The fact that education is publicly accessible, (mostly) free, and generally available to all members of society is younger than you probably think. If you are a U.S. resident, you may even have raised an eyebrow at the title. In the memory of my entire generation, the millennials, education in the U.S. was always connected with loads of student debt. But in Europe, we had this crazy time when education was practically free. But that time was very short. And we are currently witnessing the beginning of the end of general and free public education (in Europe).
Now, I’m not a scholar of education, so I’m not going to present a detailed history of that.1 But a few corner points need to be in place for what is to follow. First, I’m talking about higher education specifically, that is, university education. And second, I’m only going to focus on Europe, because it is here where higher education went from privilege to general admission, and where it is currently turning back to a privilege. And third, I’ll mostly focus on Germany, because (a) I know the system; and (b) because of course some German politician has said something stupid again.
The Origins of German Student Assistance (“BAföG”)
In the mid-twentieth century, Germany had a brilliant idea: Education is a public good, and we can gain economic strength by focusing not on manufacturing, but instead on high-tech. This also coincided with the deindustrialization of the Ruhr valley, which saw millions of former mine worker families in economic distress.2 To pull this off, however, German citizens needed to be much more educated than they were after World War II.
For most of European history, education and then university education was a privilege of the rich. First, tuition is no joke, and European universities, just like U.S. universities, charged quite a lot for the privilege to be educated beyond the basics.3 But second, and more importantly, you couldn’t really earn money and enter the workforce while studying. While most workers typically enter the labor market at around 15–17 years of age, university graduates don’t start earning money until their mid-twenties. This places economic strain onto the families of university students to support them while they couldn’t yet earn money. And that’s when “BAföG” was born. If you know German colleagues, they may have mentioned this term before. BAföG4 is a law that essentially made public education free for anyone who didn’t have the means to support themselves — read: working class people. For the transformation Germany was planning, just letting the privileged educate themselves wasn’t going to cut it.
If you want to educate large parts of a population, you also need the capacity. You require a broad net of universities that could absorb many more students than the existing ones. Luckily for Germany, a third trend coincided with the push for higher education and deindustrialization — a university reform movement. If you take a look at the list of German universities by founding date, you will see that the mode of founding dates is around the 1960s and 1970s. That’s when many universities — such as Bielefeld, Bochum, Dortmund, or Düsseldorf — were founded in an attempt to unlock higher education for the masses. And this movement wasn’t restricted to Germany — my current employer, Linköping University – had also been founded during that time, albeit for slightly different reasons.
Back to the student loans. Initially, it was both a complete gift by the government and equally given to everybody (including those without a need).5 Lawmakers quickly adjusted the law to decrease its big economic footprint, however. They added requirements where the applicant for BAföG had to demonstrate the inability of their parents to support them while studying. And then, the government required to pay back parts of the grant, turning it from a gift to a loan — albeit without any interest, and capped at a maximum amount.
This is essentially the setup that has remained until today. There is generally a willingness to increase the amount of BAföG each student can receive in loose coupling with the rate of inflation, but the perceived quantity of BAföG seems to have declined. Today, there are two big critiques of BAföG: First, there is a gap between the point at which your parents earn enough that you are no longer eligible to receive BAföG assistance, and the point at which your parents would actually be able to assist you. And second, any increases in the BAföG allowance have been dwarfed by the current crises from cost-of-living to rent to food to inflation to your average Netflix subscription.
Working While Studying
And this is my primary point that I want to make today: With all the support European governments have provided to lift working class people into the educated academic class, this appears no longer to be a priority. If education becomes so expensive that only wealthy families can afford to send their kids to university, we are back to a system of privilege. Recently, the German minister for education, Dorothee Bär, has made a statement that saw my German colleagues and me in rage. Essentially, she said that working besides visiting a university is a mere “nice to have,” not a necessity.
Au contraire.
Now, I can’t speak for the current state of BAföG, since I didn’t receive any since 2017, but I can certainly say that, even ten years ago, it was a requirement that I worked on the side. Not a nice-to-have.
You see, I come from a very poor family. My mother had been on-and-off employed for as long as I can remember, my father was in perpetual debt; my grandmother was the classical house wive supported by my grandfather who was an electrician. The fact that I could even visit school until the highest school degree (Abitur) was expensive.6 But my grandparents were fierce believers in social upward mobility and the Humboldtian ideal for education, and so they made it happen.
When I started studying history in 2011, it was a basic fact of life that I would need to apply for BAföG, and it was considered a given that I’ll get the maximum amount. The first two or three months at university were dire — I had no savings, and the application needed processing time. After I received my first BAföG payment, the situation was more stable. But even with the maximum amount of BAföG – a little over €600 – it barely covered rent and necessities. And, mind you, that was at a time when my rent for rooms in shared flats7 didn’t exceed €250–€300. I’ve heard that nowadays rent is closer to €600 (roughly what I got in total back then).8
So I used the ability to work up to 20 hours a week to get a bit more money and be able to have some free time expenses (you know, like going out once in a while). I was very lucky with the type of jobs I got, because all of them were comparatively highly paid. This meant that instead of 20 hours I typically worked only 10 to 12 each week. Also, my jobs were all close to my studies, which means that I didn’t have to deal with internal alienation from the job. But again, I couldn’t have participated in most activities considered crucial during my studies9 if I didn’t work on the side.
The Bigger Picture: Educational Retrenchment
However, I believe that this is merely part of a larger trend. I don’t think that the current stress in ensuring educational opportunities for all is caused just by high prices. Rather, I think that high prices right now serve as a good backdrop to reduce funding without nominally reducing it. This all fits into a broader trend where universities are silently being turned back from general civic educational institutions to privileged clubs.
You see, you can defund government programs in two ways: First, you can cut them outright. That is typically the most straight-forward option, but it’s also very unpopular. Second, you can simply shift money around. This is less unpopular because you can always argue that you’re funding something else important. (Paul Pierson has done great work in analyzing this phenomenon called “retrenchment” in the U.S. context.) With university funding in general, it appears to me like governments across Europe are neither cutting nor shifting money around. Instead, they essentially let the economy do the work for them. By doing nothing during a time of high inflation and a cost-of-living crisis, they effectively cut, or retrench the programs.
The fact that BAföG is considered less and less viable for ensuring university access for all is just one part of a broader trend. Last year, when I finally was able to start applying for research grants myself, the acceptance rates across Swedish science funding bodies collapsed from sometimes up to 20 % to below 10 %. A program that I was really hoping to get into and which had a decent acceptance rate, suddenly plummeted to 8 %. In addition, the European Union has effectively “rate limited” access to grants to reduce pressure on its review boards. Money is tight everywhere, and at every position in the academic hierarchy.
Students struggle more with less BAföG (or other forms of government support in different European countries); prospective PhD students struggle with much more competition on reclining positions (I heard from a PhD position with 600 applicants); and above that, it feels more like the Hunger Games than trying to compete for ideas.
Academia has entered a race to the bottom. Full-time contracts haven’t been the norm for years, people fight for scraps, and we see a general contraction of university employment.
Culturally, this appears to be caused by a dwindling sense of the usefulness of academia in the powers-that-be. When I was in undergrad, there were large-scale cuts in university funding. Two fundamental trends have been set in motion back then. First, a dismantlement of what the German public called “orchid subjects” — that is, subjects with little perceived value. One of these “orchid subjects” that got cut at my university was Ukrainian cultural history.10 But second, and more importantly, the basic funding of universities (that is, money that is not tied to specific projects) got reduced just enough so that universities were only able to fund their administrative staff from the money. Research positions had to be funded almost exclusively via third-party projects.
This is the connecting tissue between dwindling funding for faculty positions and the silent cuts for students. German politicians have figured out that cutting or restricting funding for universities is hugely unpopular among the still large academic community in Germany. The most recent of these backlashes came to be known under the hashtag #IchBinHanna. So when it comes to BAföG, they don’t do any cutting, and instead let the economically worsening situation take over.
The effect is clear: the numbers of university admissions will go down, as those who are most dependent on external funding decide against a university degree first. The number of faculty members goes down as well because there is simply no money to employ all of those who deserve it. This is a vicious circle. Fewer students imply less funding for teaching from the state, which means tighter budgets, which means less ability to hire staff … you get the point. There are some complicating factors such as high pressure from the United States, which essentially goes through the same transition, albeit with much more force. In the end, university education will slowly but steadily go back to a privilege that only wealthy families will enjoy.
The End of General and Free Public Education
There are three reasons why I wrote all of this. First, because that statement which caused so much critique on social media is an epitome of the dismissive view of many policymakers towards higher education in general. Academia does not produce immediate value, and as such is seen more as a burden than an investment in the future. In times of high economic uncertainty, anything that was once considered self-evident gets thrown overboard (see also my preprint which essentially shows just that). Especially those who come from underprivileged contexts will take issue with such statements, because they have experienced first-hand that this is incorrect. To those, it feels like a slap in the face; akin to gaslighting the next generation of BAföG recipients: “If money is tight, it’s your spending habits, not the amount of BAföG.”
But second, I see evidence of this declining priority of science as a public good in and of itself everywhere. While the United States government makes abundantly clear that they don’t like educated people, things don’t look bright in Europe either. But because the funding cuts in Europe aren’t mandated via executive order, they aren’t as visible. European academic institutions are slowly – very slowly – bleeding dry. That’s why I took that – in and of itself not too dramatical statement – as a cause to write these lines. Because if we don’t make these issues visible, nobody will.
And third, I think that it is dangerous to defund academic institutions in light of economic hardship. Asian states are just ramping up their academic systems. I know many people who left Europe for Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, and other Asian cities which have better job prospects for academics. By reducing funding and trying to pressure people into other industries, hoping for a manufacturing wonder, Europe is harming its own future. And this is one of the few instances where noble ideal of general education meets hard economic facts: Even though academic institutions don’t produce direct economic value, if we don’t educate our students and let go of our faculty staff, European competitors will run past us. And, moreover, now that the United States have started to drop out of the excellence game, it’s either Europe or no one to keep up with Asia.11
Final Thoughts
Academia is a game of attrition, and without a firm belief in the purpose of one’s own research, it is hard to stay here. But there is a difference between choosing a hard job, and getting sticks thrown into the bike’s wheel. As hard as academia is for faculty, we know the system. Students who just graduated from high school don’t. Don’t make students pay for something they had nothing to do with.
Working besides studying is perfectly fine. Even many of our students at the Master program here in Sweden are working on the side. It’s not a German phenomenon. Almost everyone I know did it, and if you do it, you’re doing it right. It is not your spending habits that cause the BAföG money to be insufficient at the end of the month.
Finally, dear policymakers, heed the calls: academia needs enough money to function. I know so many excellent scientists who decided to drop out of academia because it was untenable, and it is sad to see such bright people leave and not contribute to everyone’s benefit. Even if higher education looks like a pure cost factor on balance sheets, there is a reason European policy and trade negotiations typically work well, and that Europe is still not trailing too much behind other global powers. It’s because of the highly educated policy advisors and research staff, engineers and industrial designers that keep Brussels and each individual state afloat.
Also, that would involve so many nuances I could write a book. I believe there are others who already did that. ↩
We learned a lot in school about this transition, “Strukturwandel.” ↩
Incidentally, they still do — if you don’t have European citizenship. For European citizens, tuition sits mostly at the level of administrative costs (maybe €1,000 a year, but that heavily depends on where you are). But if you want to study at a European university without European citizenship, tuition can climb up to €10,000 or even €20,000 easily. ↩
Beautiful bureaucratic for “Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz” (Governmental Educational Assistance Law). It even has its own Wikipedia page in case you ever wanted to learn how it’s pronounced (?). ↩
Of course, not all, and I’m glossing over a lot of nuance here. ↩
In Germany, you can drop out a bit earlier and start earning money sooner. ↩
I later learned that sharing flats appears to be a uniquely German phenomenon. ↩
My colleague Sebastian Gießler has mentioned an important point here. He said that a common argument from German conservatives to the fact that BAföG barely covers rent is to “simply study in rural universities where rents are lower.” But this is still an argument for privilege: You’ll have much higher chances of high-paying jobs and of escaping the working class when your CV mentions the University of Cologne, the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, or the Humboldt University in Berlin. If recipients of BAföG should go study in, say, Kaiserslautern rather than Berlin, you’d get back to a system of privilege where the student body of universities in expensive cities like Cologne, Berlin, or Munich, would consist of a very homogenous wealthy stratum of society, perpetuating the class divide in German society. ↩
I am not going to argue with you if you don’t believe that networking with your peers, building friendships through shared activities, and participating in the university traditions, are crucial parts of the university experience. Doing that, and getting to know academic culture is just as important as the actual material you learn. Just sitting inside and never leaving the house is not a viable alternative. ↩
Fast-forward ten years and policymakers were struggling to find experts on Ukrainian history to help them understand the context of the Russian invasion. ↩
It feels a tad weird writing these lines. To be clear: In an ideal world, everyone anywhere should have the ability to go to university. And I don’t like nation-state competition, because that typically ends in war. But the reality is that the biggest Asian superpower is governed by a non-democratic regime, and they heavily invest in university education. I’m just pointing out the obvious to European policymakers who are afraid of China. ↩