Hey Michael!

Sounds great. München is an awesome city. Much better than Lafayette (sorry Purdue fans). She'll learn German too!

Question: As an American citizen how is it possible to take advantage of this?

Citizenship has no bearing on German university entrance requirements. For almost all Bachelor programmes you need German. As an English speaker it's not that hard to learn, I met a med student last month who was accepted provisionally, conditional on acceptable TestDaF results and went from no German to sufficient to study medicine in three months (of 8 hours a day, 5 days a week study.)

Note that most US high school diplomas will not get you into a German university, you need APs or community college credits. I am guessing that it would get you into a Fachhochschule[1] (again, you would need German) which grants Bachelor degrees, but is more vocational than the Universities.

[1]"University of Applied Sciences" is an abombinable translation, which tells you nothing, but it's the official translation.

A note on US high school diplomas - that's not entirely accurate. A diploma plus an ACT score of 28 or greater, or a combined SAT math+reading comprehension of 1300 or greater, or four AP classes, or a minimum GPA of 3.0 with an academic track, all qualify you. Pretty much the same sort of thing you'd expect to get into a decent college in the US, really.

[http://www.anabin.de/Xml/xmlZeugnis.asp?ID=704&Land=124&...]

See barry-cotter for the general answer, but the specific is that she's also a European citizen, because my wife is Hungarian. It helps that we've spoken German at home her entire life - she doesn't speak it, but her passive knowledge is quite good and I think a good class will get her up to speed pretty quickly. So it's not entirely a dart on the world map, is what I'm saying.

Good university, and way better than 90% of what the American HE market has to offer. Unless, of course, you value the electives system a lot.

She wants to do Aerospace, and Purdue is pretty good there (4th in the US) and we are Indiana residents - and it would still cost $40,000 plus room and board. Tuition at TU München is 500 Euros a semester and you finish a degree in three years instead of four (because they don't have to spend a year at the outset on remedial courses). Student residences are subsidized, student meals are subsidized instead of being private buffets - I mean, financially it's a no-brainer. She'll get a comparable education and we can take the same money and buy her a house when she's done.

Plus my wife is Hungarian and has been wanting to go back to Budapest for a while now. So ... it's time.