In 2006, Germany did something radical: they decided to allow public colleges to charge tuition for the first time, with fees of up to €1,000 per year. Now they’ve done something equally radical: they’ve abolished tuition again. Public universities will be free for all students, as all the state governments that had implemented tuition fees have now reversed themselves.
Libby Nelson was Vox’s editorial director, politics and policy, leading coverage of how government action and inaction shape American life. Libby has more than a decade of policy journalism experience, including at Inside Higher Ed and Politico. She joined Vox in 2014.
As Times Higher Education, a British publication, writes, the idea of paying for college was repugnant enough to students and citizens that it forced a quick and major political change:
In Hesse, for instance, students protested en masse, a citizens’ initiative collected 70,000 signatures, and the ruling Christian Democratic Union party, fighting for re-election in 2008, reversed course in order to retain power. Tuition fees then unravelled at almost the same speed as they had been stitched up. Those state governments that followed Hesse’s lead in abolishing fees stayed in power; those that refused were removed from office at the next election. The U-turns involved were often spectacular. The conservative prime minister of Bavaria, threatened with a fee referendum, arm-twisted his liberal coalition partner into abolishing fees. He survived the election of September 2013 but his liberal partner, the Free Democratic Party, having announced it would return with a better idea on fees, lost power.
This is a remarkable turnaround, although the result isn’t unusual in the European Union, where college is generally very low-cost. But not charging tuition actually isn’t the most interesting thing Germany does to make college affordable — because tuition often isn’t the biggest cost of college.
Free tuition doesn’t make college entirely affordable
The US has the most expensive universities in the world, in part because of its relatively robust system of private higher education. About 16 percent of students attend private nonprofit colleges in the US; in Germany, fewer than 1 percent do. That means that individual German states’ decision to abolish tuition at public institutions makes college tuition-free for nearly all students.
Even in the US, however, the majority of students attend public universities. And while tuition and fees are much higher here than they are elsewhere in the world, the lowest-income students at community colleges often have their tuition entirely paid for. That’s because the maximum federal grant for low-income students tops out at $5,730, while the average annual cost of tuition at community colleges is less than $3,000.
But even so, financing college isn't easy, either here or in Germany. That's because the biggest cost of college often isn't attendance fees. It's living expenses, like room and board, that are harder to pay for when you're in school and can't work full-time. This is why Sweden, which has free higher education, also has a surprisingly high amount of student debt: about $19,000 in US dollars per graduate, and the vast majority of students take out loans. They use the money to live on while attending college.
Germany’s student aid program — yes, there’s a long German word for it, Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz — handles the question of living expenses in a very student-friendly manner. Even if students still take on debt, it’s under more generous terms than the US. Students whose families are judged to need financial aid get it half as grants, half as loans. The loan has no interest, a 20-year repayment period, and repayment isn’t required until students have been out of college for five years. Repayment is also capped at €10,000 — even if students borrow more than that, they’re not required to pay it back.
Compare that to the US, where tuition is higher, federal loans for undergraduates have an interest rate of 4.5 percent, loans are typically paid back over 10 years (although that’s changing), repayment starts six months after graduation, and the average student with debt has borrowed nearly $30,000. Free tuition might not actually be the biggest difference between the US and German systems.
