American students head to Germany for free college

[1] I couldn't find a better term to refer to western world outside Europe, I don't have the intention of hurting anybody's feelings.

[2] With "voluntary colonists" I don't mean only English colonists, I mean emmigrants in general.

Quite a few could be found in the social-sciences and humanities departments after they were "weeded out" of the hard sciences. Personally, I think this is a crappy way to run things, since it means social-science and humanities professors have to deal with lots of students who are only there for a generic degree they can manage to obtain rather than for the specific degree path.

On the other hand, I put scare-quotes on the "weeded out", because often the precise method of weeding out weaker students is to simply not even try to teach well in the first year or two of math, science, programming, and engineering courses. So for instance, my fiancee actually cleared all her differential and integral calculus requirements via Advanced Placement (exams high-schoolers can take that grant university credits), with perfect scores, but when she tried to take Linear Algebra in our undergrad math department, she found the teaching so bad that she struggled to understand anything at all. Despite this, she pulled an A- in the course and was one of the top three students in her class/section -- but insists she barely understood anything at all.

It really makes me wonder what kind of pedagogical wonders we'd see if university professors were actually trying to teach well in courses below the third year.

So the biggest problem I see with moving to English within the German higher education system is that it creates the illusion that you don't really need to speak German to live in that country. But at the university, you live inside a bubble: some of my coworkers have come here from other countries five or more years ago, and still speak hardly any German. And that's fine because the working language in our department is de facto English. There are even German classes that the university offers and that some of my coworkers took, but since they never really needed it inside the bubble, their success at learning German has remained rather humble.

Now, one of my coworker wants to move on from academia and has been looking for jobs -- IT-related, that is. He's (over?)-specialized (with his PhD almost finished) in a specific area (speech signal analysis), but basically speaks no German. He's having a really hard time getting any reactions at all to his job applications. Most of the time, the companies do not even send rejection notes. I've been helping him a little bit with this, and given his credentials, I really find it difficult to understand why he cannot even get to the interview stage -- except for his lack of German.

The big problem is: if he cannot find something very soon, his visa will expire and he will be forced to leave the country. He's got a wife and two young daughters, the younger one of which was 2 years old when the family came to Germany. She's now 7 -- Germany is the country she grew up in, and she might be forced to leave it soon and move to the country of her father. Ironically, she doesn't even speak her parents' language perfectly.

So, there is a caveat when studying in Germany if your goal is to start a life here afterwards. Language matters.

What I cannot understand at all in this matter, though, is that by offering university courses in English and not requiring students to acquire very good German skills as well, Germany is basically investing a lot of (tax) money in the education of people who are more or less guaranteed to leave again when they're done with their studies.

The return of investment is thus pretty low... you could say, almost non-existent.

Student discounts used to be massive in public transportation, accommodation and almost everywhere, even in some restaurants and bars in academic cities. Nowadays these discounts are not as they used to be, so I don't think it is still a common practice.