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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

#431

Post by usrusr »

jo_ wrote: post #274

I've been digging through this thread and can't seem to find any information on the impact of 'free tuition' on tuition costs. In the US, we saw an increase in loan availability result in a significant uptick in the price of attendance to universities. If the government is paying the cost of tuition, how is the cost of tuition kept in check? Disclaimer: I love the idea of free public education. I wish it would take h…

> My only concern is how Universities will react to being paid almost arbitrary amounts of money per-student.

This is absolutely not how it works over here. The state is not saying "go learn wherever you want, if they send you a bill, we will take care of it", it is funding the universities who have to accept students who bring the educational prerequisites. Funding is certainly coupled to number of students in some way, but the rate is set by the state and universities have to compete for students within their budget.

(more like "hey, university, you seem to be quite popular with the students, you can employ up to X professors, we will pay them for you at our standard rate. Just don't forget to keep serving those students")

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#432

Post by peterfirefly »

sauere wrote: post #118
GolfyMcG wrote: post #57

Why has no one brought up how the top German university is "ranked" 55th on this list: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki... I'm not saying this list is definitive or that the US tuition prices are reasonable, but it stands to reason that the best of the best of anything is going to be exponentially more expensive than it's next closest competitors.

Mediocre performance is what you get with a system like the one that is in place in Germany. Let me throw in two numbers first: - over the last 15 years the total number of students has increased by ~48% (while the total population has shrunk by 3%) - the number of available majors has tripled within the last 7 years (with the large part of the new majors being in non-science fields) People have not gotten smarter ov…

This does not strike me as a particularly German development...

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#433

Post by FractalNerve »

daviddumenil wrote: post #173
yodsanklai wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social mobility is very low in France as well and education is pretty much free.

France has relatively high Social Mobility. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/22/social-...

Excuse my stupid question, but what does social mobility mean? [serious]

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#434

Post by toyg »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #176
toyg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there evidence that lowering fees does increase participation in university from poorer people The Italian experience is that free universities were (are) routinely oversubscribed. They opened loads of new universities in poorer areas, and still were eventually forced to introduce limits with entrance exams. The most in-demand institutions eventually reintroduced fees, although much lower than UK or US rates (we…

I think it also depends on the degree. How many graduates in Political Sciences and Literature are there ? How many job openings that require this specific knowledge ? Most of my collegues graduating with me in Electronics were working in Italy within weeks/months of graduation. But I generally agree that being available to everybody the degree in Italy is somewhat devalued.

Even "hard" topics like chemistry and medicine give very limited opportunities to Italian graduates today (since the chemical industry has basically disappeared, and there is an overabundance of medical personnel in a context of shrinking public funds). More industry-oriented ones like CS and EE do provide jobs but not necessarily careers like they used to, since the entire workforce is now expected to have a degree.

I'm not saying degrees are "devalued" (European opportunities abound, after all, and most Italian graduates are actually very smart), but it illustrates that making education (almost) free will always result in growing numbers of graduates from all backgrounds. This is a good thing overall IMHO, but should be expected and planned for.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#435

Post by lukeschlather »

superuser2 wrote: post #395
kenko wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if restaurants, cafés, etc. generally make a profit; that's not what the university should be concerned with.

Whether you believe they're what a university should be concerned with or not (and that's just, like, your opinion, man) the fact that they turn a profit means you can't point to them as wasteful spending or a culprit for high tuition.

They are frequently granted monopolies and students are required to pay for them whether they want to or not, which means that they aren't subject to any market forces and costs spiral out of control. Frequently there isn't even a line-item you can point to on your bill, it's just swallowed up in general tuition.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#436

Post by kragen »

FractalNerve wrote: post #427
bane wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, but I definitely want to emphasize this takeaway, I could have worked harder than anybody else in history, and if it wasn't for a few people giving me opportunities to jump on, I'd be a farmhand today. From the guys who hired me into my internships and helped me afford school and payed me enough to get by, to some nameless group of politicians who passed the laws that helped subsidize my schooling and put in…

Hello Bane, I'm from Germany and have read all your comments on this thread, because they piqued my interest and I admired your ambitious fight to reach beyond what live offered you. There was one thing that I really couldn't understand and I've heard a voice in my head that said: "And then he considered moving to Norway, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands or similar to graduate much cheaper and then return with a masters…

For a rural American, "moving to Norway" sounds like crazy talk. Like, is that in Africa or something? Do they have cannibals there? Do the Norwayish people have their own language? I'm struggling to figure out how to convey to you the level of lack of consciousness of Europe that is present there.

(You think I'm exaggerating, but I've had a couple of friends from the US — the urban US! — tell me they want to visit me here in Buenos Aires because they've always wanted to visit the Amazon. They didn't realize they're closer to it than I am.)

Consider this. Bane might be from, say, Nebraska. Nebraska is 7000 km from Norway, which is a country of five million people. Germany is 7000 km from Luanda, Angola, a city of five million people, and from Ningxia, China, a province of six million people. How much do you know about education policy and health care in Luanda and in Ningxia? Have you often considered moving to either of them?

Now, consider that you, as a German, are dramatically more international-minded than even an average USAmerican, let alone a rural USAmerican none of whose grandparents went to college, or probably even finished high school. So it's really unlikely that anyone in Bane's life ever suggested that he move to Norway or even Germany, at least before he got into grad school in the US.

I don't think there is much in the way of prejudice for or against Germans in the US right now. A master's degree in CS are a slight negative that you can probably overcome: academics will assume you gave up and quit a Ph.D. program halfway through, while non-academics who work in programming will think you're probably an impractical academic type. But both groups will probably pay more attention to you than to your credentials, except of course that there are academic jobs you really do need a doctorate for.

I haven't lived in the US since 2006 so I'm not up to date on your other questions.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#437

Post by whyever »

zwieback wrote: post #366
rb2k_ wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greetings from another Stuttgart expat! :)

Hope you have a good source of Laugenbroetchen, one of the specialties that are hard to find or recreate here.

They are even hard to find in some parts of Germany. :(

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#438

Post by saool »

ahomescu1 wrote: post #361
saool wrote: post #287

I wish the debate focused less on cost-benefit analysis and on ways to engineer a just "chargeback" using loans or taxes and more about the idea that maybe people should be encouraged to pursue education just for the sake of it, to become free men and free thinkers, regardless of whether they'd be economically better off by taking electricity at trade school just to quickly join the assembly line at Volkswagen so tha…

> [...] just for the sake of it, to become free men and free thinkers [...] You're assuming that one can only be a free thinker or a free man after 4 years of university, as opposed to the ignorant slaves that are the rest. What makes you believe this?

You are assuming what I assume...

I think it's much easier to be forced into being a subservient slave if you are not allowed some time to explore and learn, in a general sense.

Granted college is far from a fireproof way–especially nowadays—of reaching any degree of "intelectual enlightenment", and of course you can get to "it" without stepping into a campus, but the time you spend not worrying about "real life" can definitely help.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#439

Post by saool »

iammyIP wrote: post #375
ahomescu1 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] just for the sake of it, to become free men and free thinkers [...] You're assuming that one can only be a free thinker or a free man after 4 years of university, as opposed to the ignorant slaves that are the rest. What makes you believe this?

"people should be encouraged to pursue education just for the sake of it" - You´re assuming an assumption out of the blue.

I'm not assuming anything, I was just laying down my thesis, which is exactly that maybe we'd benefit more from education as a society if more people got some time to reflect on life as a whole before they get busy worrying about "real life".

There are definitely arguments against this thesis, mostly economic, but I think the non-maximizing side of the problem is still worth entertaining.

Re: Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

#440

Post by saool »

coryrc wrote: post #332
saool wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what The Market should be for, to make those jobs compensated attractively. Plus, people will be more likely to take a part-time job flipping burgers to fund their writing/music/open source project/whatever if they don't have pressure to pay back debt or don't have to worry about health insurance (another can of worms).

Why do they deserve the broadly desired services of doctors, nurses, professors, etc for free while doing very little for those doctors, nurses, or professors in return?

Because by incurring in certain costs up front as a group, society benefits from blurry but tangible externalities.
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