Sixteen systems, no national anything
Education in Germany is a Länder competence. There is no national curriculum, no national
school calendar and no national exam date.
The Informatik-Monitor 2025/26, published in October 2025 by the Gesellschaft für Informatik
with the Stifterverband, finds ten Länder with Informatik compulsory at all weiterführende
Schulen in 2025/26: Baden-Württemberg, Bayern, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
Niedersachsen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Saarland, Sachsen, Schleswig-Holstein and Thüringen.
Hamburg is the newest entrant. Five Länder do not: Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hessen and
Rheinland-Pfalz.
Sachsen-Anhalt is the sixteenth, and the most interesting
It splits by school type. From 2025/26 Informatik is compulsory in grades 5 to 8 at
Sekundarschule, Gemeinschaftsschule and Gesamtschule, with one weekly hour in grades 6 to 8
plus an hour moved into grade 5, extending to grades 9 and 10 from 2026/27. At the Gymnasium
it is not compulsory at all: it is an elective in grades 9 and 10 at two weekly hours, while
grades 5 to 8 take the cross-curricular course Lernen in der digitalen Welt, which carries
limited informatics content. A child on the academic track can end up with less computer
science than a child at the Sekundarschule down the road.
Why a compulsory subject is not the same product
A subject running at one or two weekly hours teaches digital literacy and the beginnings of
programming. It does not get a student to training a model, splitting data honestly, and
reading an error in units somebody outside the classroom would accept. Exams are set per
Land too: Nordrhein-Westfalen's written Zentralabitur 2027 runs 13 April to 5 May 2027 with
resits 10 to 24 May, all papers starting at 09:00. We ask for the school's own schedule.
The India link, the sharpest fact in this market
Wissenschaft weltoffen 2025, published on 26 November 2025 by the DAAD with the DZHW, counted
roughly 402,000 international students and doctoral candidates in Germany in winter semester
2024/25. Nearly 59,000 came from India, up 20 per cent year on year and the largest single
national group, ahead of China. That is the family this school already serves.
TUM, M.Sc. Informatics
Bachelor programmes at German universities are largely taught in German, and the English
route opens at Master's level. At Technische Universität München the M.Sc. Informatics is
usually taught in English, 120 ECTS across four semesters, admitting for the winter semester
only. The application window runs 1 February to 31 May each year, so the 2026/27 round
closed on 31 May 2026 and the next runs 1 February to 31 May 2027. Admission goes through a
two-stage Eignungsverfahren scoring Bachelor grades and written documents, after which a
candidate is admitted, rejected, or invited to an interview. Tuition for students from
non-EU countries is EUR 6,000 per semester full-time, while German and EU students pay the
EUR 97.00 student fee.
Tübingen, M.Sc. Machine Learning
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen teaches its M.Sc. Machine Learning in English only, 120
ECTS, winter-semester start only. Applications open in February and close on 30 April, so
the 2026 round closed on 30 April 2026 and the next deadline is 30 April 2027. English
evidence is required at IELTS academic 7.0 overall, TOEFL iBT 100, or Cambridge CAE 180, and
a German Abitur carrying six to seven years of English is also accepted. Non-EU citizens pay
EUR 1,500 per semester plus roughly EUR 200 in semester fees. Around it sit Cyber Valley,
the Tübingen AI Center, the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and the Max Planck Institutes. RWTH
Aachen University runs its M.Sc. Data Science in English only.
The route is reachable, and it is decided on a Bachelor transcript and a written application
assessed in spring, roughly sixteen months before the course starts. The mathematics and the
portfolio have to exist well before that deadline, which is the argument for starting in
school rather than in the gap year.
