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Corona crisis: Students should get emergency aid again in November

2020-10-30T19:56:49.011Z


Because of the shutdown, students fear for their jobs again, but now they should get help at short notice. Because the Greens generally see student finance in a crisis, they are calling for basic security.


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The beginning of the semester under pandemic conditions: Welcome event for freshmen in Baden-Württemberg

Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance / dpa

Bar and university closed, job gone: If the country goes into partial shutdown again on Monday, the face-to-face events at the universities are canceled and the catering industry closes again as much as possible, many students will be doubly affected.

Because two thirds of them normally work alongside their studies, a recent survey shows.

For six out of ten students, the part-time job is indispensable for livelihood.

That comes from the last social survey of the student union.

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The Federal Ministry of Education is therefore planning to reinstate the bridging aid, said a spokeswoman.

They should be "reactivated as soon as possible".

The non-repayable emergency aid of 100 to 500 euros per month expired at the end of September.

Around 135,000 students received it because they could prove that they were in financial need because of the pandemic.

A good third of the applications, on the other hand, were rejected - although in half of the rejected applications the students were demonstrably needy, but not because of the corona crisis.

The General Secretary of the German Student Union, Achim Meyer auf der Heyde, then renewed his call for a reform of student finance.

"Student Finance Crisis"

The need for this can also be seen in the amount of emergency loans: tens of thousands of students took out a KfW student loan due to the crisis.

In total, they went into debt with almost a billion euros - that's a good three times as much as before the pandemic.

Corona has made the long-standing crisis in student financing massively visible, criticized the university policy spokesman for the Green parliamentary group, Kai Gehring.

When he was a student, he was still working in order to be able to afford something, not for a living, according to Gehring.

His group called for a new start with student loans.

Because the funding only helps a small minority.

In 2019, the proportion of recipients of student loans was eleven percent.

The decline, which has persisted for years, could not be stopped despite attempts at reform.

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Training grant: number of Bafög recipients continues to fall

The Bafög was very popular at the start almost 50 years ago.

More than 40 percent of the students were initially funded, but within ten years the proportion fell to 33 percent.

The big slump came in the eighties: Since the student loan was only paid out as a loan, the proportion of recipients fell to below 20 percent.

But although the repayment obligation was later capped at 10,000 euros, the worry of getting into debt is still great - and according to the Studentenwerk and the Greens, one of the reasons why many families do not even apply. 

Basic security instead of child benefit

Gehring and his group want to convert the student loan into a kind of basic security.

Accordingly, all students and trainees up to 25 years of age should receive a monthly guarantee of 290 euros.

For this, the parents' child benefit is to be withdrawn from the start of their training. 

In addition, there should be a needs grant, which, like the student loan, is based on the income of the parents and the assets of the students.

With a maximum amount of 1062 euros in total (for under 25s minus the basic security), it should be well above the maximum student loan rate of currently 861 euros. 

In addition, the parliamentary group wants the needs subsidy not to have to be paid back - as it was when the student loan program began 49 years ago.

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With material from dpa

Source: spiegel

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