Teaching what they need instead of teaching what we like - the new software engineering curriculum at the University of Stuttgart

science, access to the universities has never been restricted. Private universities are almost unknown in Germany; all others are funded and controlled by the states (16 states form the Federal Republic of Germany) in which they are located. Students don't have to pay anything but some minor fees for insurance etc. Though there are certainly differences in quality between the universities, these differences are small compared to the differences in the US. There is no ranking, official or inofficial. Private preferences, in particular the distance from home, are the most important factors when parents and students choose a university. At the University of Stuttgart, a new curriculum called Software Engineering was launched in October 1996. It is offered by the Department of Informatics, and supplements the standard informatics curriculum started in 1970. The curriculum is new not only for the University of Stuttgart, but for all German speaking universities. This article first provides some background information about German universities in general. After this, the reasons for starting a new curriculum, its goals, and its limitations are discussed. Finally, the current state and future steps are outlined. Competition between universities is a fairly new idea in Germany; in former years, most universities had more students than they could handle, and some students were not accepted at the universities of their choice, but were moved to another place. Recently, the number of young people who want to become engineers and scientists decreased considerably. Though computer science was not affected as seriously as traditional engineering, in most universities the capacity in our field ex-ceeds the demand. Since the governments cut down funding severely, the faculties try to prove their importance by stable numbers of newly enrolled students.