The train to Friedrichshafen takes around two hours from Munich, which gives you plenty of time to stare out at the Alps and wonder how exactly a university with 52,000 students and 700 academics manages to produce graduates that top employers rate among the best in the world.
That raw number – around 75 students per professor – would be a real worry in a UK quality assurance office. Yet the Technical University of Munich consistently outperforms UK institutions in employability rankings, research output, and pretty much every metric that matters.
It’s ranked 22nd in the world in the latest QS rankings. The UK’s student-staff ratio hovers around 15:1, and we still manage to produce endless hand-wringing about contact hours and student satisfaction.
Something doesn’t add up. Or rather – something adds up very differently.
It’s Day 0 of the Wonkhe SUs study tour to the Rhineland countries of Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands – tomorrow student leaders and SU staff will meet in St Gallen to begin a five day tour of over 30 students’ unions, guilds, associations, and even the odd university official too.
But a small group of us snuck in a pre-tour visit to Munich, and we’ve just crossed Lake Constance where the University of Konstanz manages to deliver excellent learning and teaching on a staff-student ratio of over 30:1. How?
Take a break (disc)
Konstanz’s StuVe (SU) operates a whole range of student-run services. The Kulturticket is a particular highlight: a scheme that gets students free access to Theater Konstanz (Germany’s oldest continuously operating theatre, running since 1607), the Südwestdeutsche Philharmonie orchestra, the Zebra Kino arthouse cinema, and even jazz concerts in the Palmenhaus on Mainau Island. Since 2023/24 they’ve added the Kulturzentrum am Münster, covering galleries and the medieval tower.
It’s funded through the semester fee, negotiated by the student culture department, and it works: students actually use it. There’s also a bicycle repair workshop open on Wednesdays, Lumière – a student-run campus cinema showing Tuesday evening films in the 600-seat Audimax – and a rooftop vegetable garden called CampusGemüse where students grow their own produce on a flat roof, funded by the StuVe’s sustainability portfolio.
Then there are the law clinics. LAW & LAKE is a student-run legal advice service offering free help with tenancy disputes, employment issues, and consumer rights – cases under €700, handled by senior law students supervised by professors and practising lawyers. Separately, the Refugee Law Clinic provides immigration and asylum advice to displaced people, with law students trained through weekend intensives led by specialist solicitors. Both run entirely on volunteer labour, supported by StuVe coordination and funding.
The biggest operation is the Campus Festival, which the StuVe has organised since 2015. It’s a two-day open-air event at the Bodenseestadion that now draws around 23,500 people and books genuine headline acts – Kraftklub, AnnenMayKantereit, Sean Paul for 2026. It started as a small student initiative in the university forest and has grown into one of southern Germany’s notable summer festivals, complete with comedy, spoken word, and a separate electronic music stage.
The remarkable thing is that it’s still fundamentally student-organised, coordinated through the StuVe’s events portfolio. They also fund a Projektfördertopf – a pot of money for student-led educational and political projects, from anti-racism football matches to lecture series. Students who want to make things happen don’t have the only option of forming a society, with all of the rigamarole that brings. The message is consistent – if students want to do something useful, the infrastructure exists to help them do it.
One small touch we liked – the Bib-Pausenscheibe. Reserving library seats isn’t allowed, but the StuVe provides little “break discs” at the entrances – you set the time you left, and it signals to other students that you’re coming back within the hour. Low-tech, trusting, and very German. It solves the eternal library problem of bags-on-seats without requiring an app or a booking system.
Unbundling
The curriculum architecture is revealing. At Konstanz, lectures and seminars aren’t bundled into single modules the way they typically are in the UK.
A Vorlesung (lecture) is a separate unit – often large-enrolment, taught by a professor, assessed by written exam at the end of semester. A Seminar is a small-group class of 10–20 students, assessed through presentations and written papers of 15–20 pages. The two forms have distinct pedagogical purposes. Lectures transmit content at scale. Seminars develop and assess competence through discussion and independent work. Seminars are taught by professors, postdocs, PGRs or other wissenschaftliche Mitarbeitende (academic staff), and sometimes by external practitioners brought in on a Lehrauftrag (teaching assignment).
Methods modules in the early semesters – things like “Historical methods and source analysis” – run as structured skills workshops with around 15–20 students. Advanced thematic seminars in later years expect substantial independent research. The model assumes that not everything needs to be assessed in the same way or by the same person, and that large-group content delivery doesn’t require the same staff-student ratio as intensive written feedback.
The credit structure reinforces this. A standard BA in say History is 180 ECTS – 120 in the main subject, 40 in a compulsory academic minor, and just 20 ECTS – around 11 per cent of the degree – in Überfachliche berufsorientierte Qualifikationen (transferable career-oriented skills), which includes the internship. That skills component is pass/fail only. It doesn’t count toward your degree classification. The graded credit comes entirely from subject teaching – lectures, seminars, methods modules, advanced seminars, thesis. The discipline owns all the credit that matters.
UK universities have gone a different way. We’ve embedded employability into the disciplinary curriculum – asking historians to teach CV writing, asking chemists to assess reflective journals, asking engineers to deliver modules on “professional identity.” QAA encourages it. TEF rewards it. The skills content is credit-bearing, counts toward classification, and lands on academics who’d rather be teaching their subject.
Germany looked at the same problem and made a different choice – let specialists handle the careers and employability stuff, but keep it separate from the degree classification. Academics teach the discipline. The degree result reflects how well you learned the discipline. It’s a cleaner division of labour.
As universities in the UK all hurtle towards bigger modules with less choice, it suggests that alternatives are available – and as they may be better for students, SUs should probably take notice.
The pyramid scheme
Back in Munich, TUM is Technische Universität München – the Technical University of Munich. It’s one of Germany’s top research universities, founded in 1868, with around 52,000 students across campuses in Munich city centre, Garching (the big science/engineering campus north of the city), Weihenstephan/Freising (life sciences), and even Singapore.
It’s been designated a “University of Excellence” three times running under Germany’s federal excellence initiative (2006, 2012, 2019), is ranked 22nd globally in the latest QS rankings, and is known for engineering, natural sciences, and increasingly management. 18 Nobel laureates among its researchers and alumni.
TUM operates at scale, you have to understand the German teaching model – and it’s genuinely alien to UK assumptions about what “contact time” means.
A typical TUM module might have two hours of Vorlesung – a large lecture with 200, 300, sometimes 400 students – delivered by the professor. That’s where the theory lives. But the real learning happens in the Übung – smaller tutorial sessions of 20-40 students where problem sheets get worked through, concepts get tested, and questions get answered. These tutorials aren’t taught by the professor – they’re taught by students.
Specifically, they’re taught by student tutors – paid at €12-14 per hour depending on whether they hold a bachelor’s degree – who’ve recently completed the same module themselves. The Tutor Coordination Office at TUM’s informatics department, for instance, recruits student tutors for “all compulsory courses” and “several elective courses.”
They receive pedagogical training through a dedicated Tutor Academy run by ProLehre – TUM’s teaching and didactics unit – which offers “a comprehensive approach to understanding and implementing effective teaching practices” through a 30-unit course combining online self-study with in-person workshops.
It’s a pyramid scheme, but in the good way. Students who’ve just mastered a concept teach students who are currently wrestling with it. They remember what was confusing. They know which analogies worked. They have credibility that a professor delivering the same lecture for the twentieth year simply cannot have.
And for the student tutors, teaching deepens their own understanding. As the informatics department puts it, being a tutor means “you improve your presentation skills” and “get an insight into teaching activities” – skills that translate directly to the graduate labour market. Some tutors even earn 4 ECTS credits for completing a didactics seminar alongside their teaching work.
There’s also the TUM Future Learning Initiative, now in its third round. Launched by the university President (ie VC) in 2020, it invites students, staff and alumni to pitch ideas for improving teaching – with €20,000 from the university’s alumni association to fund the winners. This year’s recipients include TUM.live, a student-built platform for automatic lecture recording that’s being scaled across more rooms, and “TUM meets ZONTA,” a project from the Gender Equality Office tackling financial literacy for female students.
The jury includes student representatives alongside Board members and teaching specialists. It’s a small pot of money, but it signals something – that students and early-career staff might actually have useful ideas about how teaching could work better. In England, we tend to consult students about their “experience” and then ignore the findings. TUM hands them a budget and tells them to build something.
Expecting more, giving less
The model depends on a fundamentally different assumption about what university students are supposed to be doing with their time. The Humboldtian tradition – named after Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose reforms in early 19th century Prussia created the modern research university – emphasises Lernfreiheit (freedom of study).
Students are expected to be autonomous, self-directed learners. A 6 ECTS module at TUM might have only 3 SWS (Semesterwochenstunden – semester weekly hours) of contact time, which works out to around 45 hours across the semester. But the module expects 180 hours of total work. The difference is self-study.
In the UK, we’ve drifted towards a model where contact hours can be a measure of quality – more is better, surely? – while simultaneously creating assessment regimes that tell students exactly what to learn and how to learn it. The result is a kind of learned helplessness. Students wait to be taught rather than learning to teach themselves.
At TUM, the expectation is different from day one. Attendance at lectures often isn’t mandatory. The lecture slides go on Moodle. If you don’t turn up, that’s your problem – you’ll need to learn the material anyway, because the exam will test whether you know it, not whether you sat through the presentation. The assumption is that you’re an adult who can manage your own learning.
This isn’t about abandoning students – it’s about trusting them. And it’s about building support structures – like the students who teach tutorials, supervise bachelor theses, and run practical sessions – that make self-directed learning actually work.
Where students run the show
After a morning deep-diving into TUM’s academic structures, we looked at Garching to see where the student representation actually lives. The Studierendenvertretung – StuVe for short – operates very differently from a UK SU. There are no sabbatical officers in the traditional sense.
Instead, there’s an AStA (Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss – general student committee) of around 35 elected students who each take responsibility for specific portfolios – international affairs, social issues, sustainability, culture, sport, and so on. They’re paid small Aufwandsentschädigungen – compensation for expenses – rather than full salaries.
But what struck us wasn’t the governance structure. It was the space.
The StudiTUM houses are entire buildings dedicated to student activity. There are three of them – in Munich city centre, in Garching, and in Weihenstephan – representing €15 million of investment jointly funded by the state and university. The Garching StudiTUM alone has 1,500 square metres of floor space with approximately 265 learning spaces plus around 100 additional spaces for group work, relaxation, and creative projects. There’s a seminar room, a music rehearsal room, a lounge, a quiet space, a rooftop terrace, and a basement that hosts everything from band practice to billiards.
StudiTUM is fantastic because it’s going to “fill a very big need” one former student representative says:
There aren’t many places where we can discuss things outside our own faculties or just kick back.
The hope, he explains, is that StudiTUM will be:
…the beginning of a real campus university where life goes on after 6pm.
That’s the thing about Garching – it’s 10km from Munich centre, accessible by U-Bahn but still feels isolated. For years it was essentially a commuter campus – students arrived, attended lectures, and left. The StudiTUM houses, along with the “Neue Mitte” development and initiatives like the Campus Cneipe pub, are trying to create the infrastructure for community that UK campus universities often take for granted.
TUNIX, GARNIX, and doing nothing very well
The StuVe runs two major annual festivals – TUNIX at Königsplatz in Munich city centre, and GARNIX at the Garching campus. The names are untranslatable puns – TUNIX sounds like “tu nix” (do nothing), GARNIX like “gar nix” (absolutely nothing) – which capture something of the self-deprecating spirit. Both are organised “von Studierenden für Studierende” (by students for students), with over 400 student volunteers involved across the two weeks.
GARNIX has been running for over 20 years, transforming the MI forecourt into a beer garden with live music, food stalls, sports tournaments, and open-air cinema. The programme ranges “from Hip-Hop to Bavarian to Reggae/Ska all the way to the hardcore sound of Metal Friday.” TUNIX, now in its 43rd year, does the same thing at Königsplatz, with the Glyptothek museum as a backdrop. Both are free entry. Both are funded through the student services fee that all students pay.
There’s something here about the relationship between universities and student culture that the UK has largely lost. When TUM President Wolfgang Herrmann declared the StudiTUM buildings open, he praised “the excellent collaboration with the student body” on projects from “the idea to implementation.” The festivals and the spaces aren’t seen as peripheral – they’re treated as central to what makes a university community work.
What we could steal
Back on the train, several ideas kept nagging. First – the student tutor model. UK universities employ PhD students as teaching assistants, but often with the systematised training and pedagogical support that TUM provides. And we almost never pay undergraduates to teach other undergraduates.
The benefits seem obvious – for the tutors who deepen their learning, for the tutees who get relatable instruction, and for the institution that stretches its teaching capacity. It’s not a replacement for professional academics. It’s a complement that recognises learning happens in multiple directions.
Second – space matters. The UK has seen SU commercial operations contract, university catering turned into a privatised treat rather than essential service, and “efficiency” drives that treat social space as something that looks nice when you visit but is impractical when you’re there. TUM invested €15 million in buildings whose primary purpose is giving students somewhere to be – and then given it to them to run.
Third – self-study expectations. The coming Lifelong Learning Entitlement in England forces questions about how many credits students need to be enrolled for before they can claim student finance and universities are struggling with costs, much of which is tied up in academic staff. On the evidence here, it all becomes more viable when you have a range of structures which involve students more as owners of the academic experience.
To St Gallen now, where the student version of Davos takes place up a mountain.
