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Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

timeshighereducation.co.uk

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Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#201

Post by Roboprog »

thro1237 wrote: post #188
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a free education, but add a screening process to measure the psychology of the student, help choose a profession or trade that will not be a waste of their time.

This is true. I had to clear an 'entrance examination' to prove my aptitude in engineering. But the problem is the people who would benefit the most from free education (at the lower social/income strata) will most likely have poor aptitude for high-income potential professions as well, because of poor primary and secondary schools they would have had access to. I know that some institutes take such students and prov…

Do they have the problem of vastly differential funding between local schools in 21st century Germany?

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#202

Post by dozenal »

raverbashing wrote: post #73

I find the "American model" and the "European model" dichotomy very interesting. American model: individually centered, "pay for what you want", development is driven by small companies and individual decisions (most of the time). "Works for me" European model: centered on the community, social support, development by committee/government/consensus. Slow but directed improvements Germany could not have produced Faceb…

We used German scientists to develop our nuclear weapons and the space program. That must count for something.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#203

Post by gress »

this_user wrote: post #135
nhaehnle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social mobility in Germany is very low, doing consistently worse than e.g. the Scandinavian countries (I remember seeing sources claim that it is even worse than the US, but there seems to be no agreement on that). However, as far as education is concerned, it would be wrong to blame universities. The German school system is very stratified, "locking in" a child's destiny at a young age. Via parents who understand th…

Social mobility is low that is a well-documented fact, but I disagree with blaming the educational system for that. There are always paths to work your way up in the system even if you were not always in the highest tier. I personally know several people who did it that way. There are more than enough high-profile examples e.g. former Chancellor Schröder who started with a retail apprenticeship, then passed his Abitu…

"There are always paths to work your way up in the system even if you were not always in the highest tier."

Your argument seems to be that since there are some people have moved between social tiers, anyone can move between social tiers if they choose the right strategy.

This is a plain fallacy.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#204

Post by ctdonath »

gress wrote: post #189
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a free education, but add a screening process to measure the psychology of the student, help choose a profession or trade that will not be a waste of their time.

You mean like in the movie, Divergent?

Nope. Divergent's screening process involved bloodletting to choose a career path, then an aggressive testing process where those who fail were cast outside polite society with zero chance of ever pursuing any other options.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#205

Post by smeyer »

nilkn wrote: post #51
zura wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is price significant for public/state universities as well in US?

It depends heavily on where you go, but large and popular public schools can still be very expensive in the US. Here's an example of the cost breakdown at one such school: http://admissions.missouri.edu/costs-and-aid/costs/index.php Even more popular public schools like UCLA tend to be about $10k/year more: http://www.admissions.ucla.edu/prospect/budget.htm Just to give you an idea of the cost of, say, Harvard... htt…

I went to Harvard, but I think it's important to note that the vast majority of private schools don't have the wealth (and corresponding aid) of Harvard and its ilk.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#206

Post by jahewson »

lucio wrote: post #196
toyg wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> general taxation in which case the people who didn't go to university (generally less well off) are paying for your degree. That's a nice story, but it doesn't tally with the other story about UK tax revenues being overwhelmingly provided by well-off people. So which is which? General taxation is not a bogeyman, if done fairly. If a poor person had to pay 1p per year to send a poor kid to university, with the other…

Counter example: There are 8000 poor persons paying 1p and 10 well-of paying 100 for his kids to go to university. None of the 8000 poor people has kids in univ.

Sorry, but no. We know that there is 40% attendance at university, so 3,194 of the less well-off people would have kids who attend.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#207

Post by tzs »

DasIch wrote: post #165
smm2000 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's useless to send most criminals (especially minorities with 1/3 jail ratio) to community colleges. Majority of them could not even finish high school and still read at fifth grade level after graduation. It's a noble idea but unfortunately education is not for everyone. The only result of sending unprepared people college, will be making college less safe and destroying quality of education for kids who are prepa…

You do realize that the obvious logical conclusion of this line of thinking, is to put "most criminals" behind bars for the rest of their lives -- or to be more economical sentence them to death?

That is only a logical conclusion of that line of thinking in worlds were community college is a prerequisite for all useful jobs or roles in society. We are not in such a world.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#208

Post by aidenn0 »

raverbashing wrote: post #104
melling wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a high-speed rail network has nothing to do with our "model". It's 50 year old technology with commercial use before man first set foot on the moon. There are a dozen countries with it. Spain, for example, has a few thousand miles. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_rail_lines

I'm not talking about the technology, I'm talking about the implementation. Doing this requires a lot of collective work: investment, property acquisition or licensing, railway building, etc This requires collective vision and goals

US population density: 34/km^2

Germany population density: 226/km^2

The Northeast US has a fairly good railway system despite it having a lot of legacy constraints not around in Germany. Most of the rest of the US is far to sprawling for railways to be effective.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#209

Post by akerl_ »

eqdw wrote: post #112
samuli wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Finland has never had university tuition fees and it is the 3rd most equal country in the world. http://www.goodcountry.org/country/FIN Finnish students get allowance from the government for the duration of their studies (max ~60 months) and get government backed cheap loans which they start paying back after their studies. My own experience is that there are people from very varying backgrounds in the Finnish u…

> Finnish students get allowance from the government for the duration of their studies (max ~60 months) and get government backed cheap loans which they start paying back after their studies. Thought experiment: American students also get government backed cheap loans. Further, since these government-backed cheap loans are often used to cover cost of living as well as tuition, they are a de-facto allowance from the g…

I expect it's because of who does the bargaining. In the US, where students take out loans and then pay educational institutions with that money, the student is the one bargaining. The student has very little leverage, comparatively, and they are not incentivized in the short term to drive a hard bargain because they're going to turn around and get the money via a loan.

When the government is directly covering the cost of education, they are the ones bargaining with educational institutions. If the institution tries to bump prices, the government can pull funding for that institution and basically eliminate their revenue. As such, the institutions and government are required to negotiate much more rationally.

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