It’s Exam Time for Germany’s Universities

FRANKFURT AN DER ODER, Germany — Already a year behind in course work after two years at Viadrina University here, Ilina Pohlman looks well on her way to meeting the national standard of taking six or seven years to earn a four-year degree.

College education is free in Germany to any student--German or foreign--who has earned a high school diploma. And without a grading system to spotlight laggards, or much promise of a job after graduation, Germany’s institutions of higher learning have become havens for eternal students.

But such costly traditions are now under threat. As the federal education budget shrinks in inverse relation to the ever-swelling student body, those who fail to keep up now risk being kicked out.

“The permissiveness of letting 11 or 12 semesters go by without finding out how much a student had accomplished just got to be unaffordable,” said Hans Rainer Friedrich, a federal Education Ministry official who helped draft reforms that are shaking up campuses across the country. “Everyone still has the right to entrance, but now there are requirements for performance.”

Some educators, fearful that German institutions are losing their competitive edge in a streamlining global economy, have raised the idea of levying modest tuition on university students to defray the mounting cost of their education. But most Germans regard both tuition and admissions standards as violations of their human rights, and the equally unpleasant notion of performance measures has won grudging support only because of the even more unwelcome alternative: higher federal taxes.

With generous social security for an aging population and 11.5% unemployment eating up state resources, the government has had to tighten the educational spending belt. Last year, a new federal framework on higher education was launched among Germany’s 16 states, which are now experimenting with ways of doing more with less.

The budget cuts are actually being applauded by many educators as prods for logical and long-overdue changes, such as the introduction at some schools of a course-credit system and pre-diploma examinations. For others, though, change is fostering fear and resistance.

“It’s very frustrating. I feel caught between two systems,” said the 21-year-old Pohlman, an international business student in this university town on the Polish border. “We are expected to finish sooner now, but the obstacles haven’t changed. You spend two years trying to figure out what courses should be taken when, and by that time you’ve already fallen behind.”

Unlike at American undergraduate schools where a student can start by taking core classes applicable to any degree, German students must declare a major at the outset and complete a specific program. If a student decides to change majors, it’s back to square one.

With universities this year moving to “performance-based funding,” under which the government rewards schools that graduate more students faster, unfamiliar deadlines are being set for students to measure up or move out.

Rector Says Changes Get Students to Focus

Viadrina rector Hans Weiler, who returned to his native Germany six years ago after teaching for three decades at Stanford University, praises the reforms for inspiring students to focus more seriously on their education under the new threat of “ex-matriculation.” But he blames the ivory-tower aloofness of professors and excessive course demands for the length of time it takes Germans to graduate--13 semesters, or 6 1/2 years, on average.

“Universities have been piling up the material for ages. Every new generation of professors has put on a new layer of what it takes to study law, or biology, or language,” said Weiler, arguing that a German bachelor’s, called a Diplom, actually carries the intellectual weight of a master’s.

Viadrina is just 6 years old and unique in its international focus, with nearly half its 3,000 students from Poland. It nonetheless suffers the shortcomings of more established institutions, such as an absence of student counseling and guidance.

While the reforms tackled so far have stirred nationwide debate on the crisis in higher education--with more being spent each year to graduate fewer--they are just baby steps toward eliminating all that is wrong on the German campus, says Friedrich of the federal Education Ministry.

“The pressures of a more competitive global economy should be felt at our universities to a much greater extent than is so far apparent,” Friedrich said. “There is increased willingness among Germans to be self-employed, but the education system completely ignores the subject of entrepreneurism. Students are taught to go into civil service or into the big industrial firms that have traditionally been the big employers.”

Several Colleges Teach Programs in English

Strengthening competition among the 15 European Union states is also driving German universities to use their funding to attract students from abroad, Friedrich says. The economic benefits of having foreign students living in German university towns, renting rooms and patronizing shops and taverns, far outweigh the costs of teaching them, he says, and attracting the best minds from around the world brings prestige to the institutions.

The drive to retain Germany’s esteemed reputation in engineering and to recover it in natural sciences now dominated by U.S. institutions has encouraged several German colleges, such as Berlin’s Humboldt University, to offer degree programs taught exclusively in English.

Administrators at Humboldt have also just introduced three-year bachelor’s and five-year bachelor’s and master’s degree programs. Pre-diploma tests are now mandatory after the first two years, and a credit point system has replaced the intimidating examinations that came only after years of study.

“We have been scaring students into studying for a long time because of these huge examinations at the end. They were afraid to stop preparing,” said Harald von Witzke, head of the master’s program in international agriculture at Humboldt.

Von Witzke, a former University of Minnesota professor, expects tuition and scholarships to play a significant role in financing higher education in the near future.

“Studying and getting a university degree in Germany is less and less attractive because of the overcrowding,” Von Witzke said. “This is the only developed country, with the possible exception of France, that has no tuition. A lot of students who have the resources simply go elsewhere.”

Because university education has always been tuition-free in the 50-year-old federal republic, private scholarship foundations are few, and banks have no habit of granting students loans. There are no private colleges in Germany at present, but several big corporations have been consulting with U.S. universities on development of elite, tuition-financed schools here.

One state education minister, Klaus von Trotha of prosperous Baden-Wuerttemberg, unilaterally imposed a form of tuition this year by “fining” students 1,000 marks ($578) for each semester after 13. He earned 13 million marks ($7.5 million) for school coffers during the winter semester.

In Bavaria, the wealthiest of German states, professors blame the high cost of living for students’ protracted education.

“A lot of kids have to work; otherwise, they can’t afford housing,” said Jean Gregory, a mechanical engineering professor at the Technical University of Munich. “There are no cheap dormitories or student housing here like at universities in the United States.”

Gregory, an MIT graduate who did her doctoral work at Stanford, raised eyebrows in January when she warned that overcrowding and underfunding were making study in Germany “like shopping at Aldi”--a budget wholesaler where huge crowds must find their way amid vast offerings with little or no assistance.

Class Sizes Can Be Upward of 500

Student-professor ratios at German universities average 60 to 1, while the comparable U.S. figure is about 15 to 1, said Gregory, adding that class sizes upward of 500 are evidence that students cannot get the attention they need.

“The central issue no one has yet addressed is whether education at the university level is something that the state should provide for everyone,” said Gregory, who supports a tougher admissions process. “The German attitude is that everyone gets a chance, and there’s a lot to be said for that. But when you see 50% dropout rates, it’s time to think seriously about being more selective.”

Dropouts in Germany, though, tend not to leave academia but to start again with another major.

Gregory also worries that tying state funding to an institution’s success in graduating students could encourage a lowering of standards.

“You want more kids run through? Fine,” the frustrated professor said mockingly. “Roll down the car windows, and we’ll throw in the diplomas!”

Reunified only since 1990, Germany also suffers an ideological split on education reforms. The five states of former East Germany and those in the west with leftist leaderships tend to categorically reject tuition and admissions criteria, while conservative-governed states favor some form of academic triage to reduce expenditures and overcrowding.

But even among the easterners, there are strong differences of opinion.

“It must be left up to the individual states to decide on admissions,” said Saxony’s education minister, Hans Joachim Meyer. “I’m against the idea that people have a legal claim to certain things--higher education being one of them. The current practice is excessive.”

Meyer opposes tuition fees “for the time being” because of the lower incomes, higher unemployment and greater post-Communist investment needs in the eastern states, but he supports the creation of student-loan programs.

“Tuition takes money from the parents, who may or may not be able to afford it, while loans take money from graduates--those who have benefited from the public education system,” Meyer said.

Eastern educators argue that more reforms are needed if the government wants to save money.

“We should have general education for the first semesters so that a student has more time to decide what to study,” said Bernhard Debatin, dean of the school of communications at Leipzig University. “What we have now is a very unhappy situation, with too many students realizing they are unsuited for their chosen discipline only after several semesters.”

The answer is not, he emphasized, to reduce the number of students, which runs an unimpressive 1.8 million from a population exceeding 80 million. Only 16% of Germans have completed university degrees, added Debatin, compared with 20% among other countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But the operative word there is “completed,” say those who would like to see more Germans graduate before they reach their 30s.

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Spending Outstrips Graduations

Between 1990 and 1997, federal spending on higher education in Germany soared 89% while the number of graduates increased just 27%.

Spending (in millions)

1999*: $8.57

****

Number of graduates (in thousands)

1997: 237,144

* Projected

** Not available