As Europe has lurched from one economic crisis to another in recent months, one thing has become clear: Any long-term solution will depend on the willingness of Germany, Europe’s largest economy, to shoulder much of the financial burden the debt crisis has created. German taxpayers, known for their thrift, have balked at underwriting what many see as the financial irresponsibility of their neighbors.
Yet they remain willing to generously subsidize others from much farther afield, including foreign students studying on their campuses and at universities Germany helped create in developing countries. The cost is significant: After the United States and Britain, Germany is close to being tied for third place with France, China, and Australia in the number of foreign students it attracts. Unlike some countries, Germany does not view foreign students as a source of money to prop up cash-strapped institutions. There is little discussion, among politicians, higher-education professionals, or taxpayers, about attempting to capitalize on Germany’s popularity with foreign students and turn it into a source of income.
Instead, the internationalization of higher education in Germany is focused on the benefits it confers on both foreign and German students, German universities, and society as a whole. The country has, for the most part, continued to subscribe to the once dominant European notion that higher education is a public good, to be financed from the public purse. And, motivated in part by a drive to leave behind its xenophobic past, Germany has applied this rationale equally to foreigners, even as a growing number of European countries have abandoned that view.
Even Germany’s handful of international branch campuses, such as the Vietnamese-German University and the German Jordanian University, are driven by a desire to help develop the host nations’ educational capacity. The programs offered by German universities of applied sciences, which focus on engineering and applied research, are of particular appeal in the developing world, and these institutions have been especially active in pursuing international collaborations such as joint and dual-degree programs.
The German Academic Exchange Service, which has an annual budget of $533-million, is emblematic of how Germany views internationalization, blending the money and interests of several key German agencies. About half of its budget comes from the German foreign office, a little more than a quarter from the federal education ministry, and nearly 10 percent from the ministry responsible for international development. The service spends almost as much on scholarships for foreign students as it does on scholarships for Germans. Nearly $100-million goes toward the internationalization of German universities, and about the same amount toward educational cooperation with developing countries.
Mutually Beneficial
Germany sees international higher education as a long-term investment, says Peter Kerrigan, the organization’s deputy director in New York.
Wolfgang Mackiewicz, director of the Language Centre at the Free University of Berlin, says Germans are willing to subsidize internationalization of higher education in part because they recognize that educating foreigners is mutually beneficial.
“The world has changed, and we have to prepare our own students for internationalization and globalization, and one of the ways to do it is to bring in international students,” he says. Also, as Europe’s population ages, creating a skills shortage in Germany and elsewhere, he notes, people understand that “the E.U. can only survive if we attract talent from other parts of the world.”
Ulrich Grothus, deputy secretary general of the exchange service, cites a widespread feeling that “we benefit by bringing brilliant people here, which makes our universities better.” He also believes that the reluctance of many Germans to even discuss charging foreign students is linked to the turmoil surrounding the question of how much German students should pay for a college education.
In 2005, Germany’s constitutional court controversially ruled that universities could charge tuition, leading to widespread anger and protests. The issue became such a point of contention that some of the states that enacted fees have since revoked them. Any suggestion of fees, even for something as apparently innocuous as German-language classes for foreign students, is immediately seen as a pretext for the eventual imposition of larger, more comprehensive fees, says Mr. Grothus: “This is the political reason why nobody wishes or dares to bring it up.”
There have been a few weak efforts to introduce tuition for foreign students. In 2007 the president of the University of Bonn proposed that foreign students should be charged higher administrative fees to help cover some of the extra expenses that came with their enrollment. The proposal prompted a flurry of opposition and went nowhere.
Latent Racism?
Herbert Grieshop, managing director of the Free University of Berlin’s Center for International Cooperation, says most Germans resist the notion of differentiating between German students and those from overseas.
Students, especially, are likely to seize on any attempt to do so as symptomatic of latent racism, a potent accusation in a country where discussion of race and nationality is colored by a fascist past.
To be sure, racism remains a problem in Germany, where difficulties integrating the country’s large Turkish minority have proved especially contentious, sporadic neo-Nazi violence continues to flare, and debate over whether Islam is a part of German culture has dominated recent discourse. But foreign students, who are by definition highly educated and are seen as potential contributors to the country’s skills shortage, rarely factor into that discussion.
Daniel Obst, deputy vice president for international partnerships at the Institute of International Education, in New York, grew up in Germany. He agrees that his native country’s wartime history and its determination to forge a new identity based on a European rather than a national identity have shaped its postwar approach to internationalizing higher education.
“After the war, Germany placed such a strong value on multilateral cooperation through multilateral organizations like NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations,” he says. That same sentiment has driven the emphasis on increasing the numbers of foreign students on German campuses as well as on encouraging German students to study in other countries, he says. Postwar Germans like himself grew up “embedded in European and international networks,” he says, all of which were strengthened in part by the growing internationalization of the higher-education system.
Mr. Grieshop thinks Germans worry that if universities start charging foreign students tuition, those students will demand the same high level of services and campus amenities that they have come to expect from American and British institutions. While Germany takes great pride in the quality of its research, he says, “there is a lack of confidence in what we have to offer in terms of services.”
Among students, or at least politically active ones, there is also a strong feeling of egalitarianism that colors their views. “We don’t want to have just the rich students of other countries, we want also the students from developing countries, and they can’t pay,” says Salome Adam, a leader of an umbrella organization of student unions in Germany and a biochemistry student at the University of Leipzig.
All Equally Good
Ms. Adam also opposes the Excellence Initiative, a competitive grant program that has funneled millions to selected universities through national competitions. “We want a good level in all our universities,” she says. “We don’t want some better ones and some bad ones. We want all universities to be the same.”
Such sentiments may seem anachronistic to American educators, but they remain widespread among German students. Still, as debate over the euro crisis grows, change could be in store. Some observers think that the time is not far off when Germany will overcome its aversion to tuition. “This is a taboo which at some stage will fall,” says Bernd Wächter, director of the Brussels-based Academic Cooperation Association. “Even though it’s a public good, there is a private benefit,” he says, and taxpayers will grow increasingly reluctant to subsidize the costs.
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