Witten/Herdecke University was founded in 1981 as Germany's first and only private university. For details (in English) about this German educational experiment see History of Witten/Herdecke University.
The titles of two recent books on the subject add even more gloom and doom. But despite the rather depressing titles of Rotten to the Core? (Im Kern verrottet?) and Can the University Still Be Saved? (Ist die Uni noch zu retten?), both books actually leave the reader with some hope for German higher education -- if something is done soon.
Germany's more than 300 Hochschulen (colleges and universities) are bursting with over 1.8 million students, with another 200,000 eager freshmen entering each year. The modern university debate has been going on since the Federal Republic of Germany came into being in 1949, but it has reached a new intensity in the last several years. While an average of only 14 percent of German high school students earned the academic diploma (Abitur) that leads to college study in 1966, now, three decades later, that figure has soared as high as 41 percent in the city-state of Hamburg.
Many entrenched German traditions like free college tuition and automatic acceptance to a university with just an Abitur may be changing. Reluctantly forced into rethinking a system that is crumbling under its own weight, German universities and technical colleges, also faced with a growing budget crunch, are looking at new ways of selecting students and paying for higher education in the land that invented the modern research university. Its father, Wilhelm von Humboldt of Berlin (site of today's Wilhelm-von-Humboldt-Universität) must be turning over in his grave.
Most European countries charge tuition fees that would be considered an amazing bargain by Americans (usually under $500 per year), but Austria, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries offer university students the best possible deal: no fees at all. A free education ("Bildung zum Nulltariff") has become a popular tradition in Austria and Germany.
Annual university tuition in Europe in US$
Austria: $0 France: $165-325 Germany: $0Italy: $170-520 Scandinavia: $0 UK: $1100-4200
Source: Der Spiegel
So it is understandable that recent proposals to introduce tuition fees as "high" as 1000 DM ($650) per semester have produced intense debate in Germany. American university students would love to pay such low tuition! But Germans are shocked at the thought of paying anything, much less $650 per semester. Students used to paying only their living expenses would be expected to come up with another $1300 (2000 DM) a year for tuition fees. Proponents say this would force German students to complete their studies in less time. Detractors claim the opposite would be the case, as the students would have to take more time to raise money for their fees, and fewer young people would have the chance to go to college. As it is, 60 percent of western, and 48 percent of eastern German students work part time to help cover their living expenses.
German students are notorious for long study times. A recent proposal in the state of Baden-Württemberg to charge students a penalty for taking too long would not even go into effect until the 13th or 14th semester! Most US college students finish their studies in four or five years -- 8 to 10 semesters. The Baden-Württemberg proposal would only affect students in their seventh year, an estimated 16 percent of the 230,000 students studying at the state's universities.
Another radical departure from past German practice comes in the form of a proposal to have each of Germany's universities select its own students. This practice, the norm in the US, is now quite rare in Germany. A small Bavarian college of business administration recently became the first German college to have the right to select the students for admission. Students in Germany have traditionally applied for college in a universal selection process known as the ZVS (zentralgelenkte Vergabe von Studienplätzen, "centrally-controlled college admissions"). The Catholic University in Eichstätt was allowed to conduct a two-year experiment in selective admission. Actually, the trial run was granted to just the university's separate College of Business Administration (WWF) at a separate campus in nearby Ingolstadt.
Some German universities, including Ingolstadt, have become increasingly dissatisfied with the caliber of students admitted through the ZVS process. They have advocated a new method similar to American university admission practices, in which students apply to a specific college which then itself determines the students that it will accept. For the past ten years, a private German university (a rarity in itself) known as Witten/Herdecke has added another unique element to the selection process: applying students have to pass three oral interviews by a hearing board that includes business people and other non-academics. A potential student only gets to this interview process after his or her essay on a specific topic has been judged satisfactory.
The semi-private business school in Ingolstadt (WWF) has adopted a simplified version of the Witten/Herdecke selection process. Ingolstadt, a relatively new school founded in 1989, requires only one 30-minute interview, among other selection steps to admission. Although they realize that no process can guarantee better and more successful students, Ingolstadt and other German universities would like to see a better method than the old ZVS -- even if it does go against the traditional German prejudice against elitism of any kind. Most of the arguments heard against any new selection process usually focus on the revered German word Chancengleichheit or "equal opportunity."
But Ingolstadt, a small college with only about 600 students, pushed for the new selection process because they were having problems attracting good students to their new "International Business Administration" program. Many of the students forced into the school by ZVS did poorly and did not stay long. The school, thanks in part to strong student support, was able to persuade the Bavarian authorities to go along with their new selection proposal. This in a state that is probably the most conservative and traditional in all of Germany, and which gives its universities 80 percent of their support (the other 20 percent comes from the Bavarian Catholic church). Many people are watching this experiment very closely. Will the German system of higher education finally begin the important reforms that most observers consider essential?
Another recent proposal for college admission reform comes from Baden-Württemberg's Science Minister, Klaus von Trotha (CDU). Von Trotha's model would have students apply to three universities of their choice. Only if they failed to be admitted to any of the three would the ZVS then place students. The question remains, how would the selection process work? Precisely because they find it difficult to answer that question, some universities would rather not see such a change. But, besides the ten-year experience of Witten/Herdecke, there are other precedents for more selective admission. Germany's would-be doctors already have to pass the TMS (Test für medizinische Studiengänge) to be admitted to medical school, and some of them also have to pass an interview prior to admittance. Schools of art, music, and sports have been selecting their students for years.
The two university reform books mentioned above, as well as other education critics, also call for changes in structure. For one thing, the universities need more autononomy in their own management. Michael Daxner, the president of the University of Oldenburg and author of Can the University Still Be Saved?, says the current system is much too complicated and inefficient. He wants the schools to determine their own budgets and use their own resources better. He and others are anxiously watching the clock tick away on the future of German higher education. That's probably why the full title of Peter Glotz's book is Rotten to the Core? - Five Minutes to Midnight for Germany's Universities! (Im Kern verrottet? - Fünf vor zwölf an Deutschlands Universitäten!). Sources: Focus
Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998 Hyde Flippo
Recent student protests in Germany:
Shades of 1968?
University overcrowding and underfunding sparked student protests in several German university towns in November and December 1997. It was nothing like the student rioting and unrest that swept Germany in the late 1960s for essentially the same reasons, but the protests dramaticlly underscored the failure of Germany's politicians to realistically face the country's higher-education crisis over the past 30 years.Here is an excerpt from an article in The Week in Germany (Dec. 5, 1997):
Upwards of 40,00 students traveled to Bonn for a protest march on November 27. The following week, classes were suspended at nearly a third of the country's 300 universities and colleges...
The source of their discontent is, in a word, money, and many university and government officials agree they are right to be angry.
Budget cutting at the state and federal level, students complain, has left Germany's colleges and universities with too few faculty members, overcrowded classrooms, antiquated research facilities and inadequate libraries. Nor are the students happy about the reform measures [proposed by federal and state education ministers] early this fall. ...The ministers' proposed "Higher Education Framework Law" (HRG: Hochschulrahmengesetz) would give institutions of higher education a freer hand in financial and administrative matters as well as in admissions. It would also require students in many fields to demonstrate that they are making adequate progress by passing an exam midway through their studies (at present, exams generally come at the end of a student's career rather than at the end of courses or semesters). The protesters are calling for that requirement to be stricken from the new higher education guidelines as well as for an explicit prohibition on the introduction of tuition fees (Studiengebühren).
[For the latest on this and other topics, see The Week in Germany or the DE-NEWS daily news summary in English - Also available in German.]
