4 ms·

It's really crazy how the students reacted to this when the fees were introduced. They were very low compared to the US, less than 1000 euros for an entire year

It's really crazy how the students reacted to this when the fees were introduced. They were very low compared to the US, less than 1000 euros for an entire year yet the students responded with mass protests and vandalism. On university also had it's master key(ring?) stolen and had to spend a lot of money to redo every lock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_University#Protests_against_tuition_fees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_University#Protests_a...

tobinfricke 12y ago
The fees were really laughably small by U.S. standards, but fees, once implemented, seem to turn into a "slippery slope." So, as much as I like to mock my German students for complaining about having to pay €200 per semester, I think they were right to protest and "nip it in the bud". For instance, the University of California is formally tuition-free for in-state residents (edit: is this correct?), but over the last several decades, the required "campus fees" have grown from zero to $12,972 per year (UC Berkeley). (Perhaps someone could find a nice graph of the required fees vs time from 1960 until today.)
- cafard 12y ago
  After one of Mark Edmundson's op ed pleas for students and parents to consider college as non-vocational, I had a look at the University of Virginia's tuition and fees from the late 1970s to recently. Comparing this against the minimum wage, I found that a student could have earned the 1978-1979 tuition and fees working a bit over eight weeks at the minimum wage. For the 2011-2012 school year, it was more than 38 weeks.
  - mkaziz 12y ago
    Is this before or after tax? 38 weeks seems short to me.
    - brianwawok 12y ago
      Well, 38 weeks * 40 hours * 7.25 per hour = $11,020. Your total tax bill at a yearly income of $11,020 is very close to $0 (and with educational credits I suspect you would get back slightly more than you pay).
    - cafard 12y ago
      Before. I ignored tax, mostly because at the minimum wage you don't pay much.
  - jasonparallel 12y ago
    Uva transitioned from a state school to a state charter school in 2005 reducing its state funding.
- rubbingalcohol 12y ago
  You're correct. I went to a UC and they didn't have tuition, but there was an "education fee" of several thousand dollars.
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
    UC had very low fees until a combination of financial happenstance and determined Republican meddling (by Governor Reagan) forced them to first raise fees and then institute tuition. This was around 1983. At the time actuaries for the state were projecting dramatic multi-decade declines in population. You can see how that turned out.
levosmetalo 12y ago
If you don't fight hard going from 0€ to 1000€, then you don't have any chance resisting a raise from 1000€ to 50000€ in the next decade. Just look at what happened to, once affordable, education in USA and do the opposite. In Germany we like to get something in return for the tax we are paying to the state.
- rkrzr 12y ago
  Agree 100%, this is exactly what happened in the UK when they increased the upper limit for tuition fees.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- switch007 12y ago
  It happened in the UK. Fees started at £1,000 in 1998, rising to £3,000 in 2006 and then 2010 (?) fees rose to £9,000.
untog 12y ago
They weren't protesting 1000 euros, they were protesting fees of any kind. The leap from "no fees" to "fees" the biggest of all.
- yaeger 12y ago
  It still seemed petty when that "biggest gap of all" has a monetary value of about 20 bucks a week. For a higher education, mind you. I am willing to bet that the average student tends to spend more over the weekend in various nightclubs. And that just made me wonder if they really value their weekly nightly outing more than their own education. I came to the conclusion that it just came down to something like "But the generation before us didn't have to pay. I don't want to pay also". Also, if these fees were to be used exclusively for investing in infrastructure for higher learning, the students would profit from this. With fees like this is it of course easy that they get funneled into other funds but originally, these fees, small as they were, were supposed to be used to make upgrades in the universities. You'd think students would like to use better equipment. Because now, that they pay as little as their parents did, namely nothing, they probably will also get to use the exact same equipment their parents used.
  - pluma 12y ago
    It could have been a single Euro and it would still be outrageous. I'm not aware of any country that did not raise the fees after introducing them. In fact, universities in Germany were generally free to set the fees as low as they want and nearly every single one of them set them to the maximum allowed by the bill. It's a matter of principles. Introducing tuition fees at all means you're abandoning the idea of universities being open to everyone. Sure, you can subsidize those unable to afford the fees, but by adding such hurdles you effectively raise the barrier to entry. And the claim that this would bring extra money is pretty naive. The idea was to shift the burden of maintaining universities from the general public (via taxes) to the students (via tuition fees) in order to be able to lower (or avoid raising) the public subsidies. It would have allowed the government to reduce the subsidies arbitrarily because the universities could still make up for the difference by raising the tuition fees. Thinking that the money was needed is also pretty naive. The bill required universities to spend the money on improving the quality of education (e.g. more student tutors, better equipment, etc). The university I studied at spent the money on new buildings, including one purely administrative building that replaced the only major car park available to students in the vicinity of the main campus. But the vast majority of the money was never spent -- they only started shoving money into these building projects because they were threatened with being sued over keeping the money in the bank (to attract interest). Oh, and at my university at least (University of Cologne), the invoices students received were accompanied by free advertising for the NRW.Bank (effectively a government-owned private company), offering a "special" loan with a slightly lower interest than other banks. The process for signing up was also very streamlined: they'd pay the tuition fees for you, you just pay the regular baseline fee (~280 EUR back then) as before and you could pretend the tuition fees don't exist until you've graduated and need to pay the loan (and accumulated interest) back. Very thoughtful of them, but also very devious. It also didn't help that our principal tried to dispel the protesters by saying that every student could afford the tuition if only they drank one less beer per day. But the primary reason student organizations found the tuition fees so appalling is the trend happening at the time: the switch to the BA/MA system, the reduction of high school from 13 to 12 years, the "Eliteuniversität" programme (which incentivised further shifting money from niche subjects to the more attractive ones (basically anything likely to receive outside funding from major corporations)) and the general "Verschulung" of higher education to make university degrees more useful for HR and less about real education or science, effectively turning universities into US-style diploma mills. The original German ideal of university (compared to the more business-oriented Fachhochschule and the traditional IHK job training system or the craft Geselle/Meister systems) is the studium generale or studium universale. In other words: the renaissance man approach to science, striving to become a polymath by educating yourself to achieve wisdom and become a more informed citizen. That education should be open and available to all who seek it out. The origin of this ideal is generally ascribed to Humboldt. The general trend of adapting the more "open" university system to the "needs of the economy" (this was a major selling point for the BA/MA switch back then) and thus further blurring the distinction between university and other forms of (job-related) higher education stands directly opposed to this ideal. Whether you think this ideal has any worth or not (or even whether it is remotely realistic or not), it was a major source of conflict during the protests.

tobinfricke 12y ago

The fees were really laughably small by U.S. standards, but fees, once implemented, seem to turn into a "slippery slope." So, as much as I like to mock my German students for complaining about having to pay €200 per semester, I think they were right to protest and "nip it in the bud". For instance, the University of California is formally tuition-free for in-state residents (edit: is this correct?), but over the last several decades, the required "campus fees" have grown from zero to $12,972 per year (UC Berkeley). (Perhaps someone could find a nice graph of the required fees vs time from 1960 until today.)

cafard 12y ago
After one of Mark Edmundson's op ed pleas for students and parents to consider college as non-vocational, I had a look at the University of Virginia's tuition and fees from the late 1970s to recently. Comparing this against the minimum wage, I found that a student could have earned the 1978-1979 tuition and fees working a bit over eight weeks at the minimum wage. For the 2011-2012 school year, it was more than 38 weeks.
- mkaziz 12y ago
  Is this before or after tax? 38 weeks seems short to me.
  - brianwawok 12y ago
    Well, 38 weeks * 40 hours * 7.25 per hour = $11,020. Your total tax bill at a yearly income of $11,020 is very close to $0 (and with educational credits I suspect you would get back slightly more than you pay).
  - cafard 12y ago
    Before. I ignored tax, mostly because at the minimum wage you don't pay much.
- jasonparallel 12y ago
  Uva transitioned from a state school to a state charter school in 2005 reducing its state funding.
rubbingalcohol 12y ago
You're correct. I went to a UC and they didn't have tuition, but there was an "education fee" of several thousand dollars.
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  UC had very low fees until a combination of financial happenstance and determined Republican meddling (by Governor Reagan) forced them to first raise fees and then institute tuition. This was around 1983. At the time actuaries for the state were projecting dramatic multi-decade declines in population. You can see how that turned out.

levosmetalo 12y ago

If you don't fight hard going from 0€ to 1000€, then you don't have any chance resisting a raise from 1000€ to 50000€ in the next decade. Just look at what happened to, once affordable, education in USA and do the opposite. In Germany we like to get something in return for the tax we are paying to the state.

rkrzr 12y ago
Agree 100%, this is exactly what happened in the UK when they increased the upper limit for tuition fees.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
switch007 12y ago
It happened in the UK. Fees started at £1,000 in 1998, rising to £3,000 in 2006 and then 2010 (?) fees rose to £9,000.

untog 12y ago

They weren't protesting 1000 euros, they were protesting fees of any kind. The leap from "no fees" to "fees" the biggest of all.

yaeger 12y ago
It still seemed petty when that "biggest gap of all" has a monetary value of about 20 bucks a week. For a higher education, mind you. I am willing to bet that the average student tends to spend more over the weekend in various nightclubs. And that just made me wonder if they really value their weekly nightly outing more than their own education. I came to the conclusion that it just came down to something like "But the generation before us didn't have to pay. I don't want to pay also". Also, if these fees were to be used exclusively for investing in infrastructure for higher learning, the students would profit from this. With fees like this is it of course easy that they get funneled into other funds but originally, these fees, small as they were, were supposed to be used to make upgrades in the universities. You'd think students would like to use better equipment. Because now, that they pay as little as their parents did, namely nothing, they probably will also get to use the exact same equipment their parents used.
- pluma 12y ago
  It could have been a single Euro and it would still be outrageous. I'm not aware of any country that did not raise the fees after introducing them. In fact, universities in Germany were generally free to set the fees as low as they want and nearly every single one of them set them to the maximum allowed by the bill. It's a matter of principles. Introducing tuition fees at all means you're abandoning the idea of universities being open to everyone. Sure, you can subsidize those unable to afford the fees, but by adding such hurdles you effectively raise the barrier to entry. And the claim that this would bring extra money is pretty naive. The idea was to shift the burden of maintaining universities from the general public (via taxes) to the students (via tuition fees) in order to be able to lower (or avoid raising) the public subsidies. It would have allowed the government to reduce the subsidies arbitrarily because the universities could still make up for the difference by raising the tuition fees. Thinking that the money was needed is also pretty naive. The bill required universities to spend the money on improving the quality of education (e.g. more student tutors, better equipment, etc). The university I studied at spent the money on new buildings, including one purely administrative building that replaced the only major car park available to students in the vicinity of the main campus. But the vast majority of the money was never spent -- they only started shoving money into these building projects because they were threatened with being sued over keeping the money in the bank (to attract interest). Oh, and at my university at least (University of Cologne), the invoices students received were accompanied by free advertising for the NRW.Bank (effectively a government-owned private company), offering a "special" loan with a slightly lower interest than other banks. The process for signing up was also very streamlined: they'd pay the tuition fees for you, you just pay the regular baseline fee (~280 EUR back then) as before and you could pretend the tuition fees don't exist until you've graduated and need to pay the loan (and accumulated interest) back. Very thoughtful of them, but also very devious. It also didn't help that our principal tried to dispel the protesters by saying that every student could afford the tuition if only they drank one less beer per day. But the primary reason student organizations found the tuition fees so appalling is the trend happening at the time: the switch to the BA/MA system, the reduction of high school from 13 to 12 years, the "Eliteuniversität" programme (which incentivised further shifting money from niche subjects to the more attractive ones (basically anything likely to receive outside funding from major corporations)) and the general "Verschulung" of higher education to make university degrees more useful for HR and less about real education or science, effectively turning universities into US-style diploma mills. The original German ideal of university (compared to the more business-oriented Fachhochschule and the traditional IHK job training system or the craft Geselle/Meister systems) is the studium generale or studium universale. In other words: the renaissance man approach to science, striving to become a polymath by educating yourself to achieve wisdom and become a more informed citizen. That education should be open and available to all who seek it out. The origin of this ideal is generally ascribed to Humboldt. The general trend of adapting the more "open" university system to the "needs of the economy" (this was a major selling point for the BA/MA switch back then) and thus further blurring the distinction between university and other forms of (job-related) higher education stands directly opposed to this ideal. Whether you think this ideal has any worth or not (or even whether it is remotely realistic or not), it was a major source of conflict during the protests.