Empowering people to grow – with high quality, future ready education for everyone

Our mission at IU is very simple, and it is very personal to me: we exist to democratize education so that more people can grow.

Not as a slogan on a wall, but as a promise to real people: if you have the drive to learn – whatever your background, your age, your grades, your postcode – there must be a real path for you.

By removing traditional barriers, equipping our students with digital first skills, and aligning study programs with what employers actually need, IU expands opportunity, strengthens social mobility, and directly addresses Germany’s critical skills shortages.

1. Improving access & social mobility

In 25 years, IU has grown from a small private university into Germany’s largest university, with around 130,000 students in more than 200 programmes. But the real story is who those students are:

• Over 70% come from non academic families.
• Around 16% study without a traditional Abitur, often via vocational qualifications and work experience.
• Over 20% of our students are raising children or caring for relatives while they study.
• And 84% say they would not have the opportunity to study without IU.

So when we talk about “democratizing education”, it is not an abstract ideal. It is about real people – nurses, social workers, AI engineers, software developers, parents and career changers – who now have a university badge on their CV and a genuine chance for upward mobility.

2. Boosting workforce & addressing skills gaps

IU is one of the country’s largest providers of critical talent:

• The biggest share of students in Social Work study at IU – every year, thousands of our graduates go on to work in youth welfare offices, schools and social services.
• At the same time, we are the largest educator in digital and AI related fields – from business informatics and data science to cyber security and IT management – areas where Germany is missing tens of thousands of specialists.

By opening doors for non traditional learners into these fields, we directly support Germany’s social infrastructure and its digital transformation: more qualified social workers for vulnerable communities, more IT and AI talent for an economy under pressure to modernise.

3. Graduate quality

A university should be judged on what its people can actually do. That is why we care deeply about independent evidence. In a very recent, soon to be published independent study, German employers were asked how IU graduates compare to graduates from other universities. Their answers were unambiguous:

• 89% see our graduates as more engaged and more practice oriented.
• 85% say they prefer IU graduates in recruitment.
• 64% rate IU students as the most attractive candidates in the market – eight percentage points above the benchmark for all other universities.

This is not our self assessment. This is what the people who hire our students are telling us. It is also why 89% of our students believe that their investment of time and money into education has been very much worth it – significantly more than at private competitors and especially more than at German public universities where tuition is free.

Our quality is also visible in regulation: we have just been re accredited for our quality system for the longest possible period – until 2033. That is a strong external signal of our long term commitment to high quality education.

On top of that, in an independent survey of people who have studied at more than one university and can compare services, 91% say IU provides better support, 91% say IU has better teaching, and 86% say IU helps them better to reach their full potential.

4. Innovation in learning

In the last 15 years we have game changed education with many world firsts – always with one goal: to empower more people to grow with the most personalised, high quality education. We have been:

• The world’s first university (in 2011) to let you start your degree any day.
• Among the first to roll out online degrees at scale in Germany – now in over 100 degree programs, including Social Work, Psychology, AI and more.
• The first to enable students to write exams immediately, 24/7, the moment they feel ready.
• The first university worldwide to roll out a GPT 4 driven learning companion for all students – and we are improving it continuously.

Today, our most important obligation is not just to change how people learn, but what they learn in a world shaped by digitisation and AI. Future proof education is not just more content; it is different content:

• the ability to be more productive with AI – responsibly and ethically;
• critical thinking and problem solving;
• collaboration, communication, resilience;
• learning how to learn – again and again across a lifetime;
• making ethical and values based decisions in complex situations.

We evolve our curricula and our learning tools around these future skills, while providing the best possible academic grounding. That is why we are proud that 90% of employers say the AI and digital skills of IU graduates are as good as or better than those of other universities – and 88% of our students agree that IU prepares them better for this new world.

There has never been a time in which agility is more important for universities and educators, given the seismic shifts that work, life and learning are experiencing – and we embrace that responsibility.

On criticism – and how we respond

We have always faced criticism given the fundamental changes we pushed forward. But in recent months, we have seen more critical reporting about IU than ever before. As CEO, I have read these articles carefully. Some of the criticism is fair, some is, in our view, unbalanced. All of it matters.

We are not perfect. When you grow quickly and push into new territory, you will make mistakes and you will elicit criticism from more conservative sides. Some of that criticism we need to weather if we want to democratise and improve education.

But whenever a student is affected, I want you to know this: we care deeply. Every day, students and alumni write to me directly. Some messages are full of gratitude. Others are angry or disappointed. I read them. My colleagues and I follow up. We try, case by case, to understand, to fix, and to learn.

We are investing heavily in:

• better support,
• clearer processes,
• faster responses, and
• more transparency about who we serve and how successful they are.

We want to be judged not by how loudly we speak, but by how reliably we deliver for our students – especially when something goes wrong.

What gives us confidence is what our students tell us when they can compare. In a recent independent survey of people who have studied at more than one university:

• 91% say IU provides better support,
• 91% say IU has better teaching, and
• 86% say IU helps them better to reach their full potential.

Being a trailblazer means you will be challenged. That is not a problem. In fact, it is part of our job. What defines us is not that we never stumble, but that we listen, take responsibility, and do the work to get better.

A thank you – and an invitation

None of this would be possible without people. I am deeply grateful to our faculty and staff, who bring tremendous expertise and an extraordinary growth mindset to this mission every single day. You are willing to rethink courses, fix processes, try new things, admit when something doesn’t work, and try again. Thank you.

I want to thank our more than 15,000 corporate partners, who trust us with their talent pipelines, offer real projects and dual positions, and challenge us to keep our programmes relevant.

And to our 130,000 students and the many tens of thousands of alumni: you are the reason we exist. Your courage to learn – often alongside work, children, and everything life throws at you – is what gives this whole project meaning. Your success in companies, schools, hospitals, start ups and public institutions is the strongest argument for this model.

To everyone watching or reading – students, parents, policymakers, colleagues, critics, partners – I have one invitation: If you believe, as I do, that talent is distributed more fairly than opportunity, then join us in this work. If you believe, as I do, that education is part of the solution to almost every major challenge we face, help us to democratize it. Ask hard questions. Look at the facts. Hold us to our mission.

Because in the end, it is simple: we are here to democratize education so that more people can grow. If we keep that promise – together – the real story will not be about IU. It will be about the lives changed because someone, perhaps someone like you, finally got a fair chance to learn.

- Dr Sven Schütt, CEO of IU Group & IU International University of Applied Sciences, on 28 November 2025