North Rhine-westphalia sees foreign student population double
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In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, the number of students with foreign citizenship has doubled over the last decade.
Data from IT.NRW shows approximately 457,000 children, young people, and adults attending general and vocational schools in North Rhine-Westphalia held foreign citizenship in the 2025/26 school year. This represents 18.1 percent of the total student population of around 2.53 million. Nearly 40 percent of students without German passports come from Syria, Ukraine, or Iraq.
The number of Syrian students has steadily increased over the past ten years, and the number of Iraqi students followed a similar trend, though recently decreased slightly. Since Russia began its war on Ukraine in 2022, the number of Ukrainian students in North Rhine-Westphalia has risen significantly. In the 2015/16 school year, students without German citizenship made up only 8.9 percent of the student body in the region.
