In the case of primary and secondary education (and especially higher education), most people are drawn to Germany’s cities. But a new study has found that there is virtually no difference between Germany’s urban and rural areas when it comes to getting a quality education.

Better education in German cities is a “myth”

City-dwellers tend to look down on the “deprived” rural areas and lament their insufficient educational opportunities. In Germany’s urban conglomerations, where the highest concentration of graduates are based, it seems logical to expect that the standard of education would be higher.

However, according to a recent study commissioned by the Bavarian Industry Association (vbw), such an assumption is “simply wrong”. Indeed, according to one of the report’s writers, educational researcher Dieter Lenzen, “It is actually the other way around [...] The country is an excellent location for virtually any age from early childhood to adulthood.”

Rural schools outperform city schools

In some parts of the country, students at rural schools tend to outperform their peers in the city. In certain places, rural pupils’ level of education is more than an entire school year ahead. This is particularly the case when it comes to reading: overwhelmingly, the study found that students at rural schools had a higher reading age than those in the city.

This discrepancy can perhaps be related to the children’s social background and class composition. Above all, the school population in Germany’s larger cities is much more heterogeneous, with almost every third child speaking a language other than German as their mother tongue. In rural areas, in contrast, only 17 percent of children come from a migration background.

Universities bring value to Germany’s rural regions

The study also praised the increasingly high density of higher educational opportunities for students all across Germany. The number of universities and universities of applied sciences in the federal republic has tripled since 1990, so that nowadays no postcode in the entire of the country is more than 59 kilometres away from the nearest higher education institute.

According to the study, rural universities bring great benefits to their regions, enlivening and urbanising them, and making them more attractive to potential residents. Rather than heading straight for Berlin, Munich or Frankfurt, graduates are quite likely to stay in the area where they studied, provided they can find a job in the relevant sector.

In this way, rural universities help combat the “drain” of highly-skilled professionals away from Germany’s poorer regions in the north and east, while also offering a greater variety of training opportunities, especially in the craft and teaching sectors.