RWTH Aachen University

Institution Info

With 260 institutes in nine faculties, RWTH Aachen University is one of Europe’s leading institutions for science and research. Currently around 31,400 students are enrolled in over 100 academic programmes. Over 5,000 of them are international students hailing from 120 different countries.

The scientific education students receive at RWTH Aachen is firmly rooted in real-world applications. As a result, our graduates are highly sought after by businesses as trainees and for executive positions.

National and international rankings show that our graduates have a high aptitude for managing complex tasks, constructive problem solving in teams, and taking on leadership responsibilities. It should come as no surprise, then, that one out of every five board members at German corporations is an alumnus of RWTH Aachen.

Work conducted in the research centres at RWTH Aachen University is strongly oriented toward the current needs of industry, commerce, and the professions. This has led to numerous innovations, patents, and licenses.

The individual competence centres at RWTH Aachen collaborate very effectively across departments and faculties in interdisciplinary groups and forums, while still maintaining a strong focus on their own department specialisation. For instance, the computer science and biology departments - and even the social sciences - all have a clear connection to the school's engineering focus.

This was a crucial factor in motivating multinational corporations such as Philips, Microsoft, and Ford to locate their research institutions in the Aachen region. Against this background, it comes as no surprise that for several years now, RWTH Aachen University ranks as the premier German university with regard to external funding: According to a 2010 report by the Federal Statistical Office, in 2008 RWTH Aachen University was able to secure €193 million in funding from business and industry as well as in public research grants. This excellent result demonstrates RWTH’s special status among German universities and illustrates its success in linking academic research with private sector innovation activity.

The university's innovative force is also reflected in the high number of start-ups in the area: Over the past twenty years, about 1,250 spin-off businesses were founded and created around 30,000 jobs in the greater Aachen region.

Excellence in teaching and research constitutes the basis from which our university works with other leading institutions and technical universities from around the world: to give an example, RWTH participates in the IDEA League, a network of the leading Universities of Technology in Europe, which defines standards for degree programmes and academic training. Such international collaboration also serves to enhance the university’s position in the competition for highly-qualified and motivated students from both Germany and abroad.

The establishment of educational and research institutions modelled on RWTH Aachen in Thailand (TGGS) and Oman (GUtech) highlights the success of RWTH's approach. The approval of funding for three clusters of excellence, a graduate school and the institutional strategy "RWTH Aachen 2020: Meeting Global Challenges" by the Germany's Excellence Initiative will help RWTH Aachen University to consolidate its international competitive edge.