Studiengebühren

A Brief History of Tuition Fees in Germany

For centuries, the German university system was deeply elitist – a world of its own. This also made it clear that this privilege of the small upper class was not publicly financed, but by tuition fees. Karl Marx, for example, wrote in 1875: "If [...] higher educational institutions are free of charge, this in fact only means that the higher classes have to pay their educational costs out of the general tax coffers.“ " The fact that the FDP in the 21st century, which is rarely accused of being close to Marxism, put forward an identical argumentation in defense of tuition fees shows how much the educational landscape has changed in the meantime. For the next hundred years, however, the universities were to remain the stronghold of a small, rich elite. Tuition fees survived the founding of the republic in 1919 and 1949 and came under criticism for the first time in the student movement of 1968.

In the course of the 1970s, governments and parliaments slowly realized that it was time for universities to open up their social lives. In this process, the tuition fees of the time were abolished. In 1973, the Federal Republic of Germany finally ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, or UN Social Pact for short. It also contains the sentence "The States Parties recognize that, with a view to the full realization [of the right to education], higher education must be made available to everyone in every appropriate way, in particular through the gradual introduction of free education, equally according to his ability.“

In the mid-1990s, tuition fees found their way back into the public debate. At that time, there was still a broad social desire for free access to education, which was only broken by massive propaganda measures by business-related organizations such as the "Center for Higher Education Development" (CHE) or the "Initiative New Social Market Economy" (INSM). Several CDU-led federal states flirted with the reintroduction of tuition fees. Baden-Württemberg made a start and decided in 1997 with the votes of the CDU, FDP and Republicans so-called long-term tuition fees (1000 DM). A little later, the so-called re-registration fees (DM 100) followed, which were only declared unconstitutional by the Federal Constitutional Court in 2002 after a long legal dispute. They were then renamed "administrative cost contribution" and continue to exist today.

At that time, students tried to enforce a nationwide ban on tuition fees. For this purpose, the Action Alliance against Tuition Fees (ABS) was founded in 1999. The red-green federal government only partially fulfilled its promises to students and issued a ban on tuition fees from the first semester, but at the same time deliberately allowed other fees such as administrative fees, second or long-term tuition fees. It was precisely these that were introduced in the following years by red-green-black-yellow governed states. Only Berlin, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein remained free of charge. But even these loopholes were too small for some countries. On 16 January 2005, the Federal Constitutional Court lifted the nationwide ban on tuition fees following a complaint by several federal states, including Baden-Württemberg. The press spoke of the "blackest day" for the students.

Seven federal states took advantage of this ruling to introduce tuition fees of up to €500, which affected up to 70% of students in Germany. The amount of the fees and the circumstances under which a student was obliged to pay varied greatly and sometimes produced adventurous results: Proof of an intelligence quotient above 130 was sufficient at the University of Freiburg until the winter semester 2007/08 to be exempted from payment. Disability, student siblings or a foreign passport could also be sufficient for exemption. In Baden-Württemberg, 44% of students were exempt from paying the fee last year.

After criticism across society, little visible successes and political shifts at the state level, the federal states gradually began to abolish tuition fees again, most recently in Lower Saxony in the winter semester 2014/15. In Baden-Württemberg, the first degree at a state university has been free of charge since winter semester 2011/12 after a reform of the green-red government. In order to meet demands for maintaining the level of education, it introduced the Quality Assurance Funds (QSM) at the same time, which, at €280 per student per semester, compensated for exactly the €500 lost by the 56% of students actually obliged to pay tuition fees. In contrast to tuition fees, however, the money came from the state budget and not from the pockets of the students. After the conclusion of the "Perspektive 2020" higher education funding agreement, the QSM will continue to exist at least until 2020 and prove that good university teaching is a question of will, because it can obviously be paid for without fees.

Why Tuition Fees Are a Bad Idea

Basic political attitudes that have fallen into disrepute and are probably therefore declared dead live longer, and that is why the state's withdrawal from funding in favor of individual billing for studies  is a demand that simply does not want to disappear from public discourse. Two things are particularly important to proponents of these fees: the quality of teaching, which can only benefit from a hefty fee injection and  thus (in the case of the bolder visionaries) may at some point be comparable to Anglo-Saxon level, and justice for those who do not study.The "nurse who finances the doctor's studies with her taxes" has to serve as an image . It doesn't matter whether this example makes sense in view of the nurse's gross annual income of €25,000 and thus less than 15% income tax rate, because it's a matter of principle. Even if both mechanisms are valid arguments in principle, they do not stand up to a reality check. One after the other:

Moderate tuition fees do not catapult a university forward

MIT, with which KIT likes to compare itself, spent $1.49 billion on teaching and research in 2014 minus third-party funds 1.49 billion dollars.  This will pay about 1,050 academic staff for about 11,000 students. In 2012, KIT received about € 660 million or $ 730 million, including third-party funding from the federal government, the state, and the EU , and spent this money on teaching and research for 24,000 students and about 6,000 employees in teaching and research . In order for KIT to have the same money (per student) as MIT, each student at KIT would have to pay more than 14,000 € in tuition fees per semester - absurd. However, since it is precisely the expensive key figures such as the student-to-student ratio, technical equipment and the reputation of the professors that tip the scales in rankings, a German university will not advance into other leagues with €500 per semester and student. For the university area of KIT, i.e. KIT without the former research center, the share of total financing through tuition fees was less than 5% when it still existed. For state politicians looking for cement for holes in the budget , this is a found food, for everyone else hardly a noticeable difference.

Tuition fees do not establish justice

The above example of nurses and doctors is certainly the rule rather than the exception in Germany thanks to above-average educational inequality: children of academics study three times as often as working-class children (77% to 23%). To demand tuition fees for this reason is nothing more than capitulation to this state of affairs, which has persisted for decades. The same argument could be used to abolish the student discount in museums instead of dealing with how to get working-class children into museums, and tuition fees help to cement this inequality. Who is more likely to send their children to a fee-paying educational institution: the family of doctors with a thick financial cushion or the nurse who has little money to put aside for their children's studies?