Germany freezes medicine enrolment after university blunder

The foundation that allocates student places for German healthcare courses has paused enrolments after Goethe University Frankfurt awarded more medicine and dentistry places than it actually had.

The Foundation for Higher Education Admission (SfH) has closed its application portal as it works with state governments to find alternative places for the almost 300 students who were offered non-existent places at Frankfurt.

“On behalf of Goethe University, I apologise to those affected for the serious transmission error,” said university president Enrico Schleiff. “We are aware that this error has bitter consequences for the applicants’ personal life plans.”

In an open letter, the State Medical Association of Hesse expressed “great dismay” at the mistake and called on the state’s Ministry of Education to “urgently…remedy the situation”.

“In some cases, apartments and employment contracts have already been terminated, but commitments from other universities have also been rejected in order to be able to accept the desired place in Frankfurt,” said the association’s president, Edgar Pinkowski.

About 17,800 applicants due to start in their studies in October have had their applications frozen as the SfH works with state education ministries to find “legal as well as technical solutions” for the placeless Frankfurt students without disadvantaging other applicants.

The national conference of education ministers said Germany’s state governments “will exhaust all possibilities to help those affected and to ensure a legally secure award procedure”.

Solutions under discussion include spreading the students across every medicine faculty in the country, with each taking about seven, or offering guaranteed places starting summer 2023, Frank Ziegele, director of the Centre for Higher Education thinktank, told Times Higher Education.

A petition calling for urgent help, started by one of the affected applicants, Linda Reimann, has gathered more than 50,000 signatures. Both Ms Reimann’s petition and the Hesse medical association’s open letter refer to the current shortage of doctors in Germany.

“Part of the solution can also be the urgent creation of additional study places – as we have been demanding for years,” said Professor Pinkowski.

In a 2 September video call with the affected applicants, the foundation said it would propose a solution in the coming week, Ms Reimann said in an update to the petition.

In a letter reportedly seen by the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, Holger Burckhart, chairman of the SfH board of trustees, said the allocation process was “highly formalised and very complex”.

The newspaper said that 251 medicine applicants and 31 dentistry applicants at Goethe University had been offered non-existent places.

Professor Burckhart, who is also rector of the University of Siegen, said that for the dentistry applicants, Goethe University had promised to “solve the problem independently and to make an initial contribution to the solution”.

The foundation has said it plans to bring its admissions portal back online from 7 September.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com