Educational researcher and OECD education director Andreas Schleicher has reignited the debate over tuition fees. He spoke at the start of the winter semester for downstream tuition fees in Germany. Among other things, this provides for more social justice and a higher quality of study, he said.
Germany is one of the few states in which the expenditures per student have fallen in recent years, said Schleicher the news agency dpa. "Many of the higher education institutions no longer have sufficient financial resources to really ensure high-quality study conditions in the age of mass universities."
Schleicher argued against this background for a model of student financing as in Australia or England. There, the universities would be financed by tuition fees, which were dependent on income.
Under the model, students receive a state-guaranteed, non-interest-bearing loan from which they can pay tuition. They only have to pay back - and only then - when they have reached a certain income level, said Schleicher.
"Socially fairer"
According to the OECD expert, such tuition fees would be socially fairer than today's tuition-free study. Because low-wage earners would not have to pay them back or only partially. Graduates with "larger private returns", on the other hand, would have to receive "less public subsidies". According to Schleicher, the toll-free and taxpayer-funded study was "paid by the skilled workers for the study of the children of wealthier parents".
Germany is one of the few countries where there are no general tuition fees - but this has already changed in the meantime.
The federal states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hamburg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saarland introduced tuition fees of around 500 euros per semester around the year 2007. Hamburg tried under the black-green city government and the model of the downstream tuition. Finished academics are asked to pay after graduation.
Paid studies currently only for EU foreigners
After some large student protests, the fees were abolished after a few years. Lower Saxony was the last province to have overturned the payment program in 2015 again. Opponents of tuition fees argue, among other things, that they were particularly discouraging young people from low-income families from studying.
Most recently, fees for foreign students were debated and introduced by Baden-Württemberg. Since the winter semester 2017, non-EU students have to pay 1500 Euro per semester.
For almost three million students in Germany, the winter semester begins on October 1st.
