The Economist
One by one, German states are scrapping university tuition fees
One by one, German states are scrapping university tuition fees
BRITISH protesters who attacked Prince Charles’s car last December failed to stop a rise in university fees. Perhaps they should have taken off their clothes instead, as a group of art students in Hamburg did earlier this year. The city-state’s newly elected government, formed by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), will abolish tuition fees in 2012. Hamburg is one of several German states in which new, usually left-leaning governments are bringing back free university education. Of the seven states that introduced tuition fees after the constitutional court allowed them in 2005, just two—Lower Saxony and Bavaria—plan to continue. A half-hearted experiment is fizzling out.
This is an odd way for Germany to push its universities into the top tier. No German institution is among the leaders in global rankings, and money is part of the problem. The United States spends nearly twice as much per student as Germany does. Two-thirds of American universities’ revenues come from private sources, compared with just 15% in Germany. The federal government is pumping in money through programmes like the “excellence initiative”, which promotes mainly research at a few select universities. But it so far has done little to improve teaching, which is what students tend to care about.
(read more in the print edition)
This is an odd way for Germany to push its universities into the top tier. No German institution is among the leaders in global rankings, and money is part of the problem. The United States spends nearly twice as much per student as Germany does. Two-thirds of American universities’ revenues come from private sources, compared with just 15% in Germany. The federal government is pumping in money through programmes like the “excellence initiative”, which promotes mainly research at a few select universities. But it so far has done little to improve teaching, which is what students tend to care about.
(read more in the print edition)
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