How Germany abolished tuition fees
bbc.com
bbc.com
It does not need to. Germany has a world-class apprenticeship system. Why would we want to copy the English/American system, when our society is built on different foundations. I remember the times when Germany was laughed at for its big industrial sector and was urged to move into (financial) services like the UK did. One financial crisis later the German way all of a sudden is the way to go. So for gods sake, do not change a running system.
I would argue that someone, who has a Meister [0] (confusing, because we have the Master instead of the Diplom now, too) has much better career prospects than someone who has studied "something with media" as we call it here, just because he or she did not know what to do.
We lately came up with something new, called Duales Studium, where you work at a company while you are studying at a special school that grants Bachelors, similar to the apprenticeship system. The model is quite popular, but I am not sure if it increases the number of higher education degrees or if their students would have studied at universities of applied science anyway.
For reference, I think the English equivalent is a co-operative degree.
On the other hand, I know quite a few people with university degrees that had a hard time to find a job in their area and definitely would have an even harder time getting a visa abroad in a saturated market. This might of course be rather coincidental, but I know that in general craftsmanship titles like the German Meister or the Swiss Diploma are highly recognised internationally, and it's well known that Germany and Switzerland do a lot of high quality engineering, which I would attribute in a large part to this education system.
Software Engineering seems to be moving in this direction but I think this is applicable to almost all fields of study.
In some professions you are not allowed to start a business if you do not have the Meister. As a Meister you are now able to train other people doing their apprenticeship and are allowed to study within your field at a university, usually to be an engineer instead of a craftsman. So technically you could get a Phd without having finished school (very unlikely).
In the UK, you can do any degree and people will still hire you for a graduate job. Something like a bank or a consultancy won't care whether you did Engineering or Classics. They might care more which university you attended. The idea seems to be that anyone fairly smart can do anything.
In the Germanic world (Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia) doing a degree is choosing a life path. You're an Electronic Engineer? Great, you can apply for jobs in EE. Nobody else can. And you'll have a hard time doing something else, relative to the British EE student. There's a real belief that studying something somehow makes you competent at a job.
Neither of these views is entirely true, of course. Your Classicist will find it harder than your CS guy to write good OO code. Your German EE guy may well find himself getting by on soft skills.
What does this mean with regard to tuition fees? I suppose the Germanic system requires a certain number of graduates in various sectors, and employers would feel justified in complaining if society does not push out a sensible number of engineers. Likewise, you will hear the occasional voice in the public debate about too many people being allowed to do courses with no specific purpose. Since society is paying for this, everyone who can write to a newspaper has a voice in what young people get up to. As a young person, you really need to be on the academic path quite early to beat the selection system.
In the UK, where having a degree is a sort of entry pass to the middle class, the debate is more about fairness than economic goals. If you make it expensive, poor kids have a hard time getting those nice desk jobs that allow you to buy a house and car. On the other hand, it's individual whether you want to take out a loan, a risk that's up to each 18 year old. If you want to climb the ladder, you can pay up and give it a shot.
So there's a big question of what university is for. Is it so that society can fill out certain jobs? Or is it a vehicle for individual advancement? Of course it's a bit of both, but there are legitimate arguments for higher or lower fees, and pros and cons on both sides.
True but in my US & UK corporate experience we found that someone with a humanities degree and a Masters or Diploma in CS was by far the best hire for any technology position that had end-user exposure. A mixture of analytical, deductive and soft-skills that the inverse combination never seemed to match.
Perhaps found it harder to write good ( smart or super-efficient ) OO code but could usually write decent code to better-researched and specified requirements.
Do you really think that the soft skill building activities are equally likely to be popular among the people you meet in a humanities class compared to one in a computer science class?
And you also seem to be completely dismissing the ability of education to give you tools to better understand and contextualize situations you encounter in the real world.
If you asked two students to try to understand a complex biological system and one was a computer science major and the other a philosophy major which do you think would do better? It's probably the one who has a lot of practice building models of abstract systems, even if they are of a type that's more squishy than they are used to.
Now take those same two people and ask them to convince someone of something while knowing only a few things about them, the one who is used to thinking about various different belief systems and world views is going to find it much easier to identify with someone different from them.
Different paradigmas of programming (say, logical (Prolog), imperative, functional (Haskell), aspect-oriented, etc.) also represent various belief systems. The same can be said about nearly every aspect of computer science, say computer architecture (CISC vs. RISC, VLIW, superscalar vs. not superscalar, in-order vs. out-of-order, memory models (weak vs. strong) etc.), building blocks for algorithms (say, divide & conquer, dynamic programming, different kinds of tree data structures that make different runtime compromises, etc.), etc.
So also in computer science you are confronted with lots of belief systems and world views.
In the UK the BSc is often enough to get yourself on the job ladder.
Almost all the sciences in Germany have a PhD as an entry point for a good job. You start working at 30. In the UK you will already have been working for 9 years in industry.
This is simply because in Germany everyone else competing for jobs also has a PhD!
We should also forget that this arms race is very costly regardless of tuition prices, as most of the cost of education (to the average post-secondary student) is not tuition, but lost wages.
In the UK, people are 21 or 22 when they finish university, and it's off to find some job. It's not unusual to find 25 year old phds who've raced through the academic system.
This naturally also has an impact on the debate about who should pay, and how much.
That's a well-known anomaly.
I had no idea things were like that. I strain to believe that a bank will hire someone with a degree in Art History.
If you get a mediocre degree from a mediocre university, not so much.
The basic idea behind this is that doing well at a good university requires decent general intelligence combined with the ability to understand exactly what is expected of you and deliver exactly that, at the expected time -- and this is obviously independent of the actual subject studied.
More anecdotally, the primarily qualification for City traders is that they can think quickly on their feet and have an intuitive grasp of numbers. Nothing mathematical, just arithmetic. Trading is extremely performance led, and performance is explicit in numbers. So social capital or education as social signalling isn't particularly valuable.
As long as you can program, we'll hire you.
Technical jobs like coding require you to demonstrate ability, and therefore many people who have a not-quite right degree (physics degree to be a coder) or even no degree can get the job.
Yet they test you on an hour and a half online "coding challenge", which is completely irrelevant to day to day work. I have been looking for a senior level job recently and only one place has actually asked me questions that I consider relevant. In another I had to calculate the inersection of two rectangles for a Django job. I managed it, but it has nothing to do with my coding ability, knowledge of Pythonic / Django ways of doing things or anything that I would be doing on a day to day basis.
But it is definitely the case that someone who can't code could not possibly pass this test.
(EDIT: not sure if you were talking just about Germany. Below is for UK)
That's not 100% true. For prestigious technical jobs it might be. I've not exactly worked at Google etc but only about 70% of my colleagues/managers had degrees.
Then the argument you make that follows doesn't make much sense, either. If Germany has such a strict degree-to-job path relative to other countries, you'd think Germany's engineering companies wouldn't mind paying rewards through salaries for engineering graduates (or indeed paying direct sponsorships for students). I'd say Germany's police is such despite the fact businesses don't strictly require it, but that it's simply better for society in general because it improves everyone and works as an equaliser, as a way to boost equal opportunity. After all the notion 'anyone can take a loan if they want to climb the ladder' differs immensely. Even if tuition is completely 100% free, the fact some of us are already providers by age 18, means the opportunity cost of merely dedicating time to studying in the first place for 4 years, is an immense one. Sure its great you don't have to pay to go to school, but if you have to forgo a full-time job and you're a or the provider in the family, that's a heavy burden that requires decisions to go into debt even if tuition is inexpensive or free. It's part of the reason why those in lower socioeconomic groups go to college disproportionately less often for their success in high school and 'eligibility' to access and do well in college. In that respect I think Germany made an excellent decision.
Not really. Unemployment among people with college degrees wouldn't be so low if hiring criteria were as strict as you intimate, and they aren't. For example, I have a Ph.D. in computer science and work at my university's math department. I know astrophysicists working in IT and at least one historian (by training) working as a journalist. Businesses will hire someone with a college education not necessarily because they need the specific subject-related skills that have been installed into them in college, but just as much because of the subject-independent skills they learn; this is also why a master's degree is still the gold standard: a bachelor's degree in many quarters is still seen as something that's too much like school where you receive knowledge rather than researching it, but neither conveys the practical skills of vocational training.
Humboldt's ideal [1] has become more difficult to maintain in a world of ever expanding knowledge, but as an ideal, it still exists.
The exceptions are occupations with very specialized requirements (such as law, medicine, or teaching) and the vocational system: it's actually one of the biggest drawbacks of the system, where changing careers (in a society where 90% have a credentialed education) can be a daunting perspective past your 20s, but where vocational training often being too specialized [2] may necessitate it. This is where the situation that you describe occurs far more often.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt%27s_Ideal
[2] Vocational training has its own career paths and options to expand your skill sets, but that doesn't always work.
Statistics [1] also show that in Germany 43% started a university education, but only 28% completed one. Meanwhile, UK universities boast with their high retention rates, which might raise the question of how they achieve this without compromising the quality of the degrees. (My experience in the UK was that just about anyone got a degree, and a third (that's a grade, not a fraction) is basically worthless)
All this, I think, leads to two points. First, a lot of jobs in the UK require a degree, although it is not clear to me why. Secondly, while German universities might not be as present at the very top, the baseline seems to be a lot higher than in the UK (several factors play into this, among them the ability to switch subjects (due to lack of fees and very little social stigma) and not caring about retention rates, i.e. letting bad students fail), which is probably while the German diploma was so highly regarded.
(Another major difference I noticed was that in German universities, nobody checks up on you, and you are expected to take responsibility as an adult, whereas in England, it felt like the University was trying to be my Mummy.)
Lastly, the omnipresent reminder: foreigners don't pay tuition in Germany, either. There is a language barrier, but I probably don't need to point out all the articles which were here on HN not so long ago about increasing numbers of US and British students in Germany.
[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiturientenquote_und_Studie...
I agree on the remark on baseline quality of university.
first: there are different types of Gymnasium. I started not at a Gymnasium and then switched to a technical gymnasium.
Second: there are many other ways and an entire education industry devoted to get one to a University or similar. The 'Zweiter Bildungsweg'.
Same in the US. A degree in anything provides certification to employers that you have an acceptable level of (intelligence + conscientiousness).
I knew a couple who wouldn't hire a babysitter that didn't have a four-year degree with a GPA of at least 3.7. They weren't wealthy or eccentric. Their combined family income was probably around $65k a year and the job only paid $8 an hour. There were simply enough people looking for work that they never had trouble finding someone who met their requirements.
Granted, the above anecdote was from the USA, but I haven't found things that different here in the UK.
Apparently, according to the author, this is all justified by the fact that graduates have lower unemployment rates than non-graduates.
I think it is time to start questioning this dogma. It is the more able half of the population that is typically selected for entrance by the UK universities (and so it should be). Surely, it would be very surprising indeed, if they were not also the more employable half, regardless of whether they study or not? The content of their studies is increasingly irrelevant anyway, as is confirmed by the fact that "more than half of graduates are overqualified for their jobs". That means they are the more able people competing for the same old unqualified jobs and so, of course, they win.
In these circumstances, the "studies" of ever increasing proportion of population are nothing more than a way of transferring more of their future incomes to the bankers. It is an interesting "coincidence" that the drive for expansion of student numbers coincided with the introduction of the american model of personal loans for education and ever increasing fees.
One reason why Germany can allow itself to have no fees is the language barrier. Sweden offers lots of English master programmes and has introduced fees for non-EU citizens (EU citizens have to be treated the same as own citizens in this regard under EU law ). The Netherlands and Austria already complain about the masses of German students flocking to them. I guess there's some anxiety that there would be a storm of foreign students at British universities if fees were dropped.
there's some anxiety that there would be a storm of foreign students at British universities if fees were dropped.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/infohub/finance/tuition-fee-rates-2015...
Scottish universities have no tuition fees for undergrads from the EU, except from England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Yeah because our universities either have ridiculous waiting times (six years in waiting for medicine is THE NORM, even with a perfect 1.0 Abitur degree) or kick you out when you fail the same exam three times forever - you cannot continue your study in Germany but have to study abroad.
edit: oh, I forgot to mention the housing situation: most cities with big universities neglected building affordable housing for YEARS and the market for small-ish single occupant apartments is running hot, more than most students without wealthy parents can afford.
That's just not true. A friend of mine recently (2012) started studying Medicine in Germany with a 1.4 Abitur and an excellent Medizinertest result (an aptitude test for prospective medical students) and had the choice of the full range of Universities, including Heidelberg etc, with zero waiting time.
> kick you out when you fail the same exam three times
I never understood how someone can fail the same exam three times and still think that they're studying the right subject. Either you buck up and do it properly the second time, or you very likely have a severe lack of essential foundations.
> the housing situation
Karlsruhe is said to be one of those, yet several student dorms (Wohnheime) have empty rooms. Much of this is hoity-toity kids who don't want to share a bathroom and living room with ten others.
The housing situation is much worse in England, where shitty university accommodation will run you around £100/week (550€/month) even in smaller cities, whereas a Studentenwohnheim in Germany will cost you roughly 200€/month.
This is actually a blind spot of the German system. You simply cannot compare the skill set of a college-educated nurse and one that was trained under the apprenticeship system. This means in particular that in Germany you need a doctor to do things that in (say) America a nurse could easily handle on their own.
As for tuition fees, you can make a completely tax funded third level education system work. Developing countries do it all the time, successfully. You do this by restricting entrance to the brightest through a harsh selection process.
The problem with this is that in the long run you end up with a large percentage of the population who has only minimal education. People might sneer at somebody with a degree in English Literature but it does make a difference to live in a country where the majority have some tertiary level education experience, if only because they appreciate education more and can instil that sort of appreciation in their kids.
In the UK less so.
For example apprenticeships are not widely supported as in Germany. Go to Siemens, these people will work with the latest machines, materials and processes. They will get a dual education: work and school. If they want they can make their 'Meister' and go to the University:
http://www.hochschulkompass.de/studium/suche/studieren-ohne-...
That there has to be ways for people to go to University who have not been at a Gymnasium, this idea is not unknown in Germany. ;-)
{{citation}}
I'm a german, have gone through gymnasium and have a sibling who didn't, and many other family members who went through either of the three tracks. I have never heard anyone complain and am not aware of any controversy whatsoever, especially since students are provided ample opportunity to switch tracks at multiple points, and upgrade after the fact.
Please provide reference to this controversy you claim.
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regionale_Schule
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesamtschule
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiloberstufe
The whole discussion about it even led to some states abolishing the old system and introducing "Gesamtschulen mit gymnasialer Oberstufe", essentially, the US middle/high-school system. In other places, the Profiloberstufe was introduced. In even other places, in the same city, Gesamtschulen, Regionalschulen, G8, G9, Profiloberstufe AND erweitertes Kurssystem exist next to each other!
> Profiloberstufe
This is a cost-saving measure.
> Regionale Schule
This doesn't include Gymnasium.
> Gesamtschule
This comes close, but effectively is just a school that combines all three tracks into one, with different students leaving at different grades. Notably it also has a reduced quality of education.
> some states abolishing the old system
"Abolishing"? Really? Which Bundesland has verboten solitary Gymnasiums? I couldn't see it in the article about Gesamtschule and google also didn't give me anything.
It’s quite a large debate.
What a mistake. The German system may seem less "fair" to certain people, but at least it works. In the US we've somehow come to the conclusion we can build a society that consists only of highly educated professionals and somehow the toilets will fix themselves.
Do note that he still has to substantiate this. I live in germany and i don't know of or can find any place that actually has done this abolishing.
And there is a lot of discussion about it, and people hate it. Schleswig-Holstein has currently forbidden Hauptschule and Realschule, and there were discussions about also remove Gymnasien, but that idea was quickly thrown away.
Currently, in Kronshagen there is now an Integrierte Gesamtschule mit gymnasialer Oberstufe, which is already one of the first schools of the "one size fits all" kind.
Further, i asked for references because i have never seen any debates about any of this. So far: No links or explanations on where or how this is being discussed, only vague claims.
I really recommend you reconsider whether you're seeing debate within the circles you move in, or actually generalized across the whole country.
From Wikipedia:
> The Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz (mostly known as BAföG, its abbreviation) is the Federal Training Assistance Act for students at secondary schools and universities in Germany. The law, which regulates student loans in the country, is often referred to by students who simply say they receive "BAföG".
Especially if a student's parents aren't well off, there's a good chance he/she can get a 0% loan from the government (and 50% of that loan is given as a gift).
http://www.zeit.de/studium/hochschule/2015-08/study-abroad-g...
On 1: teachers not uploading material is hardly a systemic issue. Not all academics are great teachers, that is true. But complaining about having to take notes seems a bit whiny to me.
On 2: whether you spend the semester learning and then have a quick recap before the exam, or whether you spend it goofing off and then quickly memorize everything until the end of the exam is your choice, and your responsibility. If you need constant motivation to keep working, that is not the universities problem. You have to work on that yourself.
3. I have never taken such an exam, but the exams described here are just terrible. I assume this is related to point 1.
4. I've only ever had one card at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, for the library, the cantina, building access, printing credit, admin stuff, and student ID. As the author noted, this is being changed in Cologne too, so I'm not sure what's the point except a good rant.
5. No argument here. Administration seems to be universally terrible.
6. This is Point 1 again.
7. Wtf, Cologne?
8. Duplicate of #5.
I'm not claiming that everything is roses in Germany, but some of the author's points are about individual teachers or issues at the University of Cologne, and do not do the title justice.
I am not saying they are not there, but compared to online course for example, I think pyscially attending lectures gives more incentive to learn having invested the effort to actually turn up.
What do other people think?
Online lectures. Uploaded scripts. (At least in my university good scripts were followed so closely, that a "lecture" was exactly what the name says "somebody reading the script". And bad lectures were an utter waste of time. I remember one math prof who permanently corrected his proofs back and forth - in the end we just took photos of his blackboard "art" (back in 2000), because taking notes was absolutely pointless.)
With modern technology those could be annotated; students could have online discussions about those (think "soundcloud-style interface").
Everyone could benefit from those, not only students. Can I please live in a world where I can do every course from home, at my own pace? I'd happily pay to have my all tests evaluated and finally for time spent by university employees on my exams - for which I'd sign up whenever I am ready and without formally being enrolled as a student.
> I think pyscially attending lectures gives more incentive to learn
Or it allows for less time to learn. In my university the different institutes are distributed across the whole city and I spent 12 hours every week just on commutes between those. Thus, people who need to work for paying for their studies (not tuition, but rent, food, transportation) are already excluded by being forced to physically attend. Same for people who already have a job. I am not talking about those few who can study while working because their employer supports this, I'm talking about the carpenter with an interest in theoretical physics, astronomy or arts.
Online lectures provide too many distractions. Constant urge to check emails or HN. I tried a MOOC once (Andrew Ng's Machine Learning), and the pace was too slow for me to stay concentrated for even a couple of minutes. Still, recorded lectures can be useful (e.g. if you get sick, you can catch up after recovering). I just don't think that they're very well suited to being the primary delivery format.
There is rarely a good excuse not to upload scripts, though, and at my university most are uploaded. My university also uploads lots of recorded lectures on youtube and provides discussion forums. Everyone can watch the lectures and download the material.
> In my university the different institutes are distributed across the whole city
That's unfortunate, but it's a fairly rare problem in Germany. Many of the best universities are in fairly small cities like Heidelberg, Tübingen, Freiburg (all of these have a population between 90k and 150k). Those that aren't are often not that strewn about, or at least clustered (TU München has a Garching campus for natural sciences, but afaik students don't have to travel between the centre and Garching a lot).
My university (Karlsruhe) is a centrally located campus university. Everything is within 10 walking minutes.
> I'm talking about the carpenter with an interest in theoretical physics, astronomy or arts.
I'm all in favour of enabling that, but you neglect that 90%+ of students are full-time students, and that is the model that universities cater to.
In my little province for as long as I can recall there have always been complaints about the cost of tuition and any fees at the University.
It's a small University with a mix of local students, regional (within ~400km), some from the northeastern US and others from outside US/Canada (China in particular).
Eliminating any fees just means the student gets a break then as always when they are done with school immediately leaves the province for a job elsewhere. That's zero benefit to the taxpayers who would cover the cost.
I have been to Canada for an exchange semester and it was an astonishing experience to me in regards to tuition. Most students I talked with where in favor of tuition fees (although they hit them quite a bit financially). In general, they were quite willing to spend a considerable amount of money on top of tuition for university related things. 3 books $200 each on the syllabus for a lecture that is not borrow-able in the university library? Not an issue, people just bought them (I actually bought one book via German amazon in its translation, because it was ~50 EUR there and ~200$ in Canada, so I saved considerably even when including shipping costs). In Germany, Professors often offer their lecture notes (often book grade layed out with latex) as free downloads.
In Germany I have lived in a dorm and had roommates that would probably not have studied with tuition as high as in Germany (back then my home state had a EUR 1200 a year tuition, a measure that was in place for roughly 5 years I think and quickly repealed because it was enormously unpopular). Knowing that education is sponsored by the state makes me much more willing in paying my taxes, now that I actually earn a living.
In the 19th century, lecturers apparently collected tuition upon entrance at the door of the lecture hall. Dunno if this might be a model for tuition to compromise on. Only pay for the services you take. Looking at American tuition fees, I sometimes wonder why students would not just pay for private tutors...
For example, if you become a Kindergarten teacher, or a primary school teacher, or a nurse, you just dodn't receive an academic degree.
A few years ago this started to change. Most schools were formally changed to "Hochschulen" and now award degrees. On paper, this measure vastly increases the number of academics in Austria. But in practice, not much has changed.
Such circumstances should be taken into account when comparing the percentage of graduates across countries. The raw numbers don't tell the whole story.
You can apparently switch tracks later on, but at a greater cost in time and effort, and the stigma and consequences of this will affect you during your whole professional life.
As a late bloomer myself I find it sickening that I'm contributing to such system with my taxes.
Paid about 3500€, but made enouh money to get rid of them in the first year after I got my degree.
In the end, the money I paid is barely anything compared to the salary it resulted in. Especially considering that I was able to get BAföG which basically paid for itself in the end.
Can someone clarify how higher education works in Germany?
> People unable to attend college end up partially subsidizing those who can.
How? The people that did attend college will more taxes over their lifetime, so you could argue that the college people are subsidising the other college people.