Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

That's not true. The report you linked to is trying to "strike the right balance between keeping student charges reasonable and finding sufficient funding for their higher education systems." The goal is to simply reduce government spending on education by transferring costs to individuals.

It struck me as odd at first too, coming from Canada where certain programs at certain universities take as many international students as they can to subsidize the rest of the program.

Keep in mind this usually (but not always) involves passing the TestDAF to prove German fluency.

I'm sorry but that's the way it is if you want a skilled workforce.

If you're not paying it that way you're paying higher corporation taxes.

I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, which is really the minimum degree I would have chosen to get a job in my present field. However, probably at least 50% of the classes I took to get that degree were a complete waste of my time.

"Trade schools" in my view have a reputation for not having enough depth in the field for which they are targeted (at least, in the United States). The perception when I graduated was that a CS degree was way better than any "tech school" degree -- if you wanted to get a job, that is.

I would have loved to have gone to a school that offered a very deep Computer Science program that was targeted just at Computer Science. I didn't need or want English, Philosophy, Sociology, and all of the other worthless classes that I was forced to take to fulfill the requirements. Math classes make sense, those have useful applications in my chosen field.

And I don't have a problem with anyone that wants to take those kind of classes either. It's just that I had a specific goal in mind when I enrolled, and the results could have been so much more satisfying if the curriculum had been better targeted.

If I were starting over today (with all the resources available on the internet, etc) I would consider not going to college at all. It has become prohibitively expensive in the United States, and from what I understand things have not really changed much (and if they have it is probably for the worse). There are a ton of very high-quality resources for learning available online (many of which I wish I had more time to use). I am not at all discounting the value of well-designed classes in a school setting. However, I do think that people tend to underestimate how much a self-driven person can learn on their own.

Also, I would be far more likely to plan to be self-employed (if I were starting today) that I would have been when I was entering college. At that time, I just wouldn't have considered it. Today I'm sure that I could make that happen.

First of all, you won't actually get to learn German for free. In order to be admitted, you'll need to already speak Germany at a B2/C1 [1] level of fluency. This is probably the biggest obstacle: if you aren't already fluent, you won't learn a foreign language overnight, and if you are, you've probably already considered studying in Germany.

Second, if you're American, your high school diploma generally isn't enough to be admitted. The requirements are a high school diploma AND a 3.0+ GPA AND either a SAT score in Math/Critical Reading of 1300+ or an ACT of 29+ (successful AP courses or college experience can lower the requirements or substitute for them).

Third, you may not be eligible for financial assistance; even without tuition to worry about, you still need to feed yourself, have a roof over your head, and pay for health insurance (though health insurance for students is less than €80/month). Finding a job can also be difficult (even as an EU citizen, language skills and cultural differences may stand in the way of employment; non-EU foreigners usually are even more limited in their options).

Why does the German government keep tuition free for foreign students? First of all, the costs of running a university are mostly fixed costs and especially in STEM subjects, German universities are running below capacity; second, students that meet the requirements (fluent in German, generally capable of supporting themselves, interested in studying abroad) are sufficiently likely to stay after they've gotten their degree: they'll be valued high-skill immigrants who'll contribute to the economy and probably pay more in taxes later than they received in free tuition.

[1] https://www.daad.de/deutschland/studienangebote/sommerkurse/...