Interesting college tuition and fees model out of Germany

Free college/university education for everybody?

Germany still has it, or rather has it again after a brief and disastrous flirt with tuition fees. Right now, you are good with just a low registration fee.

Compare that to the U.S., where even community college - and we do not mean Greendale - can easily set you back a couple of thousand each semester, and two questions arise, how do they do it, and can it last?

How do the Germans do it?
Government money, which is raised through taxes. One easily identifiable issue with this system are that money is very tight, especially in these times of big bailouts and small school budgets. Another argument raised repeatedly claims that working class families, with only about 25% of their kids going to college, subsidize the education of kids from wealthier college educated families, 75% of whose offspring goes to college, too. While this second argument looks seductive, there are many underlying variables, so the blogster has to rely on the "experts" who made it.

Can it last?
Since they already experimented with a tuition fee system, probably not.  This article in ZEIT Online predicts a return of tuition fees by 2020.

Private colleges/universities
Traditionally, private higher education hasn't turned out so well in Germany. Founded, with a couple of exceptions, out of a mix of Ivy League and Oxbridge envy and neoliberal "elite" thinking, they struggled until the well founded respected state institutions began to suffer under budget cuts. Whatever their merits, they can and do ask for lots of tuition and are expanding.

A tuition model for state schools
The first, failed attempt at tuition was the simple model used in other countries. A standard fee is set, students pay as they go or get loans.
Of course, German policy makers knew from the U.S. experience of students crushed by loans how bad such a system can get but they felt safe enough because they only asked for 1000 Euros per semester. Much less than most U.S. community colleges, and peanuts compared to the Ivy League.
Backlash was fierce, the fees were dropped in state after state.

Enter the model described in detail in the Zeit article.

The basic proposal is given here. For the complete picture, read the article - via Google Translate, or pay an underemployed English major to tell you what's in it.

The basic suggestion is: the government advances the fees, students pay is back after graduation is their income is above a certain threshold. The charm of this is that predatory loans do not enter the picture, that unemployed philosophers or art grads don't suffer, that high-cost courses of study, such as medical studies or some engineering fields, can ask higher tuition to cover the higher outlays and because of superior income of graduates in these fields.

Polls contrasting various existing models with this deferred payment based on workplace success approach show, according to the article, a very high acceptance rate.

So, if anybody asked the blogster (not that this will happen), this model does seem promising.

One aspect not mentioned in the article but obvious to the country hopping blogster is a mechanism to address repayment by grads who pursue a career outside of the country afterwards.

Trust me, you don't want that most gruesome of German tabloids, BILD, spew hateful crap about some rich doctor on a tropical island having stiffed the German taxpayer.

But you also want to avoid the largely unknown provision of the U.S. where student loan debt can be taken out of your social security check in old age.