The president of the conference of rectors of German universities, Horst Hippler, considers insufficient funding of higher education institutions to be the main reason for the need to return to tuition fees. To avoid discouraging potential students from low-income families from studying at institutes and universities, representatives of the rectors' conference propose creating a system of 'deferred payment'.
Education itself will be free, but graduates will later have to share a portion of their future salary with German higher education. Many other prominent representatives of German science, but primarily those of the bureaucratic machinery that serves it, also propose deducting a part of the income of former students in favor of the universities they attended. The main reason for returning to a system of tuition fees is financial.
'Higher education already faces a significant shortage of funds,' notes Hippler. 'Tuition fees should be a logical continuation of state funding.' The unpopularity of such ideas in society should fade away when the constant need for universities to save on essentials becomes more often a subject of public debate, believes the head of the rectors' conference.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) also considers a return to student participation in paying for higher education inevitable. 'At the same time, a convincing system of student scholarships must be introduced so as not to deprive the underprivileged of the opportunity to study,' believes the head of the OECD Berlin office, Heino von Meyer. 'Tuition fees improve its quality and the level of student motivation.'
The first semester fees, called 'listener fees' (Hörergelder), amounted to 150 German marks (today about 259 euros including inflation) and were abolished in 1970 as a result of student protests. Thirty-five years later, tuition fees at universities in the Federal Republic became one of the most controversial topics of socio-political debate in German society.
The seven most populous western federal states of Germany challenged the reformed 2002 Framework Act for Higher Education (Hochschulrahmengesetz, HRG) and, after getting the green light from the Constitutional Court, introduced tuition fees at universities, which varied in amount from state to state. Mostly, students had to pay about 500 euros per six-month semester. Thus, in the mid-2000s, semester fees affected about 70 percent of all German students and 90 percent in the western states.
In eastern Germany, no state, including Berlin, charged tuition fees. Political changes, changes in state governments, and referendums led to the fact that by the winter semester of 2012-2013, tuition fees remained only in two regions – Bavaria and Lower Saxony. In the first of these two states, they were finally abolished by the winter semester of 2013-2014, in the second by 2014-2015. The shortfall of these funds, which had been included in the budgets of institutes, universities, and academies, is compensated to higher education institutions from the state coffers.
Pyotr LEVSKY.
«Russkaya Germaniya»