[2] The University of Freiburg has been associated with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Carnap, David Daube, Johann Eck, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Friedrich Hayek, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Meinecke, Edith Stein, Paul Uhlenhuth, Max Weber and Ernst Zermelo.

French King Louis XIV disliked the Austrian system and gave the Jesuits a free hand to operate the university.

The requirements for admission were changed for all faculties in 1767 (before that time only Roman Catholics were allowed to study) and Natural Sciences were added as well as Public Administration.

The Church finally lost its predominant influence on the university when the Jesuits were suppressed following a decree signed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.

After World War I, the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (since 1928) taught at Albert Ludwigs University, as well as Edith Stein.

Under the rector Martin Heidegger, all Jewish faculty members were forced to leave the university in accordance with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.

In the postwar years, the ideas of ordoliberalism, developed earlier by economists of the Freiburg School, such as Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, Hans Grossmann-Doerth, and Leonhard Miksch, drove the creation of the German social market economy and its attendant Wirtschaftswunder.

Arnold Bergstraesser, considered a founding father or German political science after World War II, was also a professor at the University of Freiburg.

The seal of the University of Freiburg depicts Christ seated on a gothic throne holding the gospel in his right hand with the temple curtain in the background.

The current University Library is also located in the historical center; it is a monumental building erected in the 1970s, and was to be renovated and redesigned beginning in September 2008.

Admission largely depends on the faculty and program applied for and is strictly merit based, with the average score of final secondary-school examinations (German Abitur) or A-levels playing an important role.

[9] The University of Freiburg offers a large variety of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral degree programs at its 11 faculties in 150 fields of study.

The University of Freiburg currently has a semester fee of 180 EUR for all undergraduate and most graduate and doctoral programs, regardless of the EU or non-EU citizenship of students.

Because of the nearby French and Swiss borders and the adjacent Black Forest, where the university owns a retreat on Schauinsland Mountain, fine opportunities exist for leisure and outdoor activities.

Students come from Central and Eastern Europe for language studies, the majority demographic category is females in age range 18–25 (58%).

However, the popularity of Freiburg for prospective students can make finding an apartment or room quite time-consuming, especially before the start of the academic terms.

The University of Freiburg, with its plans for future innovative teaching concepts, was selected as one of 10 winners from a field of over 100 higher education institutions.

[20] In university rankings published in 2007 and 2008 by German magazines and periodicals (Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Focus, etc.

[34] The University of Freiburg team has also repeatedly scored highly at the International Genetically Engineered Machine undergraduate synthetic biology competition held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The genetically engineered golden rice was developed by the University of Freiburg (Peter Beyer) and the ETH Zurich (Ingo Potrykus) from 1992 to 2000.

It was considered a breakthrough in biotechnology at the time of publication and now can help to provide vitamin A to people lacking access to it in their diets.

The University of Freiburg Institute of Physics is actively involved with research at the Large Hadron Collider and has contributed significantly to the ATLAS experiment, resulting in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

[38] The four-year, English-taught Bachelor program in Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) is UCF's major offering, the first of its kind in Germany.

Electives can be taken at UCF, in the greater University of Freiburg, during studies abroad or in the form of internships and self-directed practical projects.

[46][47] One of the notable graduate opportunities is the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, a project funded by the German Excellence Initiative.

The IGA also coordinates 12 Graduate Research Centers (Graduiertenkolleg): Biochemistry of Enzymes; Friends, Patrons, Clients; Formation and Development of Present-Day Landscapes; Mathematical Logics and Applications; Mechanisms of Neuronal Signal Transduction; Catalysts and Catalytic Reactions for Organic Synthesis (in cooperation with the University of Basel); Hadron Collider Physics; Embedded Microsystems; From Cells to Organs: Molecular Mechanisms of Organogenesis; Signal Systems in Model Organisms of Plant Origin; Micro Energy Harvesting; and PhD program Computational Neuroscience at the Bernstein Center Freiburg for Computational Neuroscience and Neurotechnology.

Together with the EUCOR universities of Basel and Strasbourg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the University of Freiburg also runs the shared graduate school École supérieure de biotechnologie Strasbourg, enabling the students to obtain an international degree in biotechnology and a trilingual education, as classes are taught in English, German, and French.

The intensive language lessons are bolstered by a supplementary program with lectures and seminars on German culture, politics, philosophy, and art, as well as excursions to the Black Forest, the Alsace region in France, Basel (Switzerland) or Lake Constance.

The University of Freiburg initiated an English language international master's program in social sciences, the Global Studies Programme (GSP) in 2001.

Combining various disciplines such as sociology, political sciences, anthropology and geography, students approach globalization with a unique perspective.