Hildesheim charges no tuition fee for Bachelor's or Master's programmes, for EU and non-EU students alike — Lower Saxony funds the university like all other public universities in the state outside Baden-Württemberg, across all four faculties.

What every student pays is the semester contribution, which is not a fee for teaching. It funds the Studierendenwerk, the student body, and the Deutschlandticket for public transport, in line with other Lower Saxony universities.

No tuition doesn't mean no proof of funds: for the student visa you still need to show about 11,904 EUR for the year, usually in a blocked account, and that money has to be transferred months before the semester starts.

These deadlines apply equally to EU and non-EU applicants who apply through uni-assist. The two English-taught IT master's programmes, M.Sc. Data Analytics and M.Sc. Software Engineering, use a separate departmental portal with its own deadlines instead of uni-assist.

The two English-taught IT master's programmes, M.Sc. Data Analytics and M.Sc. Software Engineering, use a separate departmental application portal instead of uni-assist.

University of Hildesheim confirms two English-taught Master's programmes on its own site: M.Sc. Data Analytics and M.Sc. Software Engineering, both in the IT and IT-related area of Faculty 4. Almost all Bachelor's programmes and most Master's programmes are taught in German, so a Bachelor applicant will need German for the great majority of the catalogue.

English certificates apply only to the two English-taught IT master's programmes; every other programme is assessed on German language certificates instead. The exact score is set per programme, so check your programme page before booking a test.

Work backwards from the lecture start rather than the semester start when planning your arrival.

A small foundation university in Lower Saxony, tracing back to a teacher training college founded in Alfeld in 1946 and reconstituted as one of Germany's first foundation universities under public law in 2003. Its four faculties concentrate on education and social sciences, cultural studies and aesthetic communication, language and information sciences, and mathematics, natural sciences, economics and computer science, with particular strength in teacher education, applied linguistics, psychology and information management.

The compact campus and small student body — around 8,600 students against Aachen or Cologne's tens of thousands — make it a personal setting where international students get close contact with faculty rather than anonymity, though that also means the English-taught catalogue is narrow and most study here requires German from the start.