Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
timeshighereducation.co.uk
Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
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Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
#2* University education? free
* Article to read about it? Pay for it.
This beautifully sums up the differences of education and news.
Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
#3* University education? free * Article to read about it? Pay for it. This beautifully sums up the differences of education and news.
Very well said!
Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
#4I wish this happened in US. The fee part, not the paid to read part :)
Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
#5It'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_a...
Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
#6another version: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/15/german-universi...
I basically think this is a very big news. It effects a lot of people. Though I think this only applies (and should) to domestic students.
In our country (India) .. the Right to Education Act was a hot topic this year.. it still has to go a long way.. but it can learn from Germany's example of doing away with the fees altogether in Public Universities. Young people are the driving force behind the economy. But many fail to live up to their potential due to economic constraints.
1. Most Public Universities already run mostly upon Tax-Payers Money. So Burden is not that sudden, as one would think.
2. Expansions would be more scrutinized. We have to look at this in terms of Fixed and Variable/Recurring Cost.
3. Caution would be required on part of distributing the money corpus. Some colleges are in comfortable zone of the balance sheet, while some aren't. Those who are not, need to be looked after.
4. Students should still be charged for some "Extras" like Foreign Trips (optional in many colleges).
I would love to know the finer details of how German Govt is handling the economics around this decision. This could be a Epic Success or Epic Fail. The dice has been cast.
Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
#7I wish this happened in US. The fee part, not the paid to read part :)
I go to Oakland University in Michigan and we are the only University in the state(country?) to charge no fees. Tuition is still high but that is usually set by the state.
Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
#8But the newspapers haven't scrapped the paywall. (And setting my user agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" didn't dispel it :(
Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
#9Impressive. I wish US would do the same.
Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
#10It'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_a...
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.)