Hochschule Osnabrück - until 2010 the Fachhochschule - was formally established in 1971 as a merger of several older institutions, but its threads reach further back. The engineering school dates to 1962. The agricultural school was founded in Quakenbrück in 1936 and relocated to Osnabrück in 1952. The Institute of Music goes back to the city's public music academy of 1919. In 2003 the whole assembly became something unusual in German higher education: a foundation with legal capacity under public law. By 2006 it was one of the largest such foundations in Germany by expenditure. The 2010 winter semester crossed 10,000 students for the first time.

In 1987, while most German universities still treated nursing as a vocational matter best left to hospitals, the Fachhochschule Osnabrück created West Germany's first professorship of nursing science. It was an unfussy move with long consequences. The German Network for Quality Development in Care - the body that develops national expert standards for nursing practice - is headquartered here. So is the FamiLE research college, a doctoral programme studying family health across the life course, run jointly with Witten/Herdecke University. Nursing in Germany became a research discipline in part because Osnabrück decided it should be one.

The university spreads across three quite different campuses. Westerberg, on the city's wooded hill of the same name, holds engineering, computer science, business and social sciences in the Caprivi barracks complex and its newer extensions. Haste, on the northern edge of town, hosts the School of Agricultural Sciences and Landscape Architecture in a five-hectare park where greenhouses and test plots butt up against the Wiehen Hills. Lingen, an hour west in the Emsland region, occupies the converted halls of a former railway repair workshop and runs the Management, Culture and Technology faculty. The Lingen campus opened in October 2012 after the old workshop sheds were extended.

The interdisciplinary Ignition Racing Team, roughly 41 students drawn from engineering and business, builds a Formula Student car each year and races it against teams from across Europe. Every spring the campus hosts the Terrassenfest, a music festival big enough to pull crowds from well beyond the student population. The university has also become a recurring location for German television. The 2007 Tatort episode The Nameless Girl, set in Osnabrück and centered on Inspector Charlotte Lindholm, used the campus as a backdrop - the fictional murder victim attended a course here. A 2008 ARD film called Vertraute Angst used the Caprivi campus as a psychiatric clinic. In 2007 a documentary drama about Remarque was filmed at the very barracks where the young writer once drilled.

For a regional university of applied sciences, the international reach is striking. An MBA in international supply chain management is run jointly with Münster's university of applied sciences and Saxion Hogeschool in Enschede, the Netherlands. A logistics course called LOGinCHINA runs with Hefei University. Another MBA, focused on management and leadership, is offered with Buckinghamshire New University in High Wycombe. An Erasmus+ joint master's degree in research and innovation in higher education runs with partners in Beijing, Krems and Tampere. The university is one of seven members of UAS7, the German federation of leading universities of applied sciences. The Volkswagen Foundation backed a million-euro soil science project here from 2012 to 2016. The agricultural test farm at Wallenhorst hosts the Competence Center for ISOBUS, the global communication standard for agricultural machinery. A barracks built for soldiers now mostly produces engineers, nurses and farmers.