Mission statement

At HSHL, we embrace diversity: We value the diversity of our students, teaching staff, and employees while harnessing the potential that this diversity provides to shape teaching and learning across our university. It is important to us to make diversity visible, to continuously hone our perception of diversity, and to foster equal opportunity. We embrace a culture of openness and support the joy of experimentation. Respect, tolerance, and an active error culture are essential core values for us.

We create educational spaces for people with different academic biographies and in different phases and situations of life. We actively incorporate these heterogeneous perspectives into the design of study concepts and curricula.

Our students are at the center of everything we do. Our teaching and learning activities, our service and consultation offers, as well as the overall study and teaching processes ensure that students can undertake successful and high-quality studies. At the same time, we expect our students to actively shape the teaching and learning process and take responsibility for their educational success.

Together with our students, we create and sustain a vibrant campus life with inspiring places for student learning and living at our campuses in Hamm and Lippstadt.

Upon successful completion of their studies, our students will have acquired a generally recognized and future-oriented professional qualification, coupled with the ability to work independently and scientifically, while being supported in their development into responsible personalities.

Our educational program prepares students for the dynamic conditions of life and work in the real world. We align the curricula and educational profiles of our degree programs with current and constantly changing technological, economic, and social demands. One overarching characteristic of our degree programs is their application-oriented and practical relevance. Through practical phases, cooperation, and networking with companies, we provide our students with myriad insights into professional life and help them reflect on these insights in a targeted manner. Our activating teaching also includes examples of practical applications, case studies, projects, and simulation games.

We believe that the education we offer should have a context to social issues, tasks, and challenges and that participation and involvement in regional social discourse are indispensable components. We foster the social and cultural participation of our students, thereby promoting the visibility of our university locally and regionally.

Over the course of a degree program, we develop performance-oriented, critically thinking, and self-reflective personalities who contribute to the world of work and society with their creative will, problem-solving skills, and sense of responsibility. Future skills such as digital, transformative, and intercultural competencies round off the profile of our graduates.

We deem the quality of teaching and learning an important element of success. Mutually, we take very seriously our responsibility for quality assurance and further development in studies and teaching. We foster and challenge students with varying levels of learning preconditions while offering individual counseling and support services that help them successfully earn their degree.

We act according to defined internal and external quality criteria and regard the further development of our teaching and learning offerings as a continuous process of quality improvement. To achieve that, we comprehensively and regularly evaluate our curricular and academic offerings as well as the administrative and other services involved with studies and teaching. The results are then reported to various target groups. Besides that, we set up regular communication events for exchange and feedback.

We design all teaching, learning, and testing aspects to be factually and methodologically up-to-date, competence-oriented, application-related, research-based, and interdisciplinary. We see ourselves as a university that promotes the use and further development of a wide range of teaching, learning, and testing formats (analog/digital/hybrid). It is a self-evident part of our quality culture that our teaching staff and employees partake in regular subject-related and/or didactic continuing education and advanced training.

We place high value on special commitment and achievements in and for studies and teaching by actively promoting them within the university and by creating incentive systems.

We see ourselves as a regionally anchored university that thinks globally and regards internationality as one aspect of our diversity. We foster an open, welcoming culture and actively further the integration of international students, teaching staff, and employees into our teams. To this end, we are expanding bilingual communication (German and English) within the studying and working routines at our campus, offering support and advisory services, and fostering (inter)cultural exchange.

We maintain an international dialog across foreign universities, companies, and organizations by creating exchange opportunities for our students and staff. At the same time, we are striving to increase the proportion of English-language modules and courses in our German-language degree programs aimed at promoting the acquisition of the foreign language skills required and enabling us to act as an equal and reliable partner in international exchange programs.

Similarly, we are expanding our range of English-language programs to enhance our ability as a university to attract international students. By teaching them technical, linguistic, and cultural skills, we train them to become specialists, particularly for the regional and German job market, but also for the international job market.

As a learning organization, we see lifelong learning as an integral part of our ability to confront and shape the dynamic developments in society and the working world. It is our commitment and endeavor to continually develop the competencies of everyone. We share the expertise available at our university and bring generations and target groups together in a mutually beneficial way.

We invite everyone interested in education to participate in our diverse study programs and continuing education courses as part of their individual lifelong learning process. That is why we make our offers transparent and enable participants to use them flexibly.