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BBC reports that Germany has abandoned tuition fees altogether for German and international students alike and more than 4,600 US students are fully enrolled at Germany universities, an increase of 20% over three years. "When I found out that just like Germans I'm studying for free, it was sort of mind blowing," says Katherine Burlingame who decided to get her Master's degree at a university in the East German town of Cottbus. "I realised how easy the admission process was and how there was no tuition fee. This was a wow moment for me." When Katherine came to Germany in 2012 she spoke two words of German: 'hallo' and 'danke'. She arrived in an East German town which had, since the 1950s, taught the majority of its residents Russian rather than English. "At first I was just doing hand gestures and a lot of people had compassion because they saw that I was trying and that I cared." She did not need German, however, in her Master's program, which was filled with students from 50 different countries but taught entirely in English. In fact, German universities have drastically increased all-English classes to more than 1,150 programs across many fields.
So how can Germany afford to educate foreign students for free? Think about it this way: it's a global game of collecting talent. All of these students are the trading cards, and the collectors are countries. If a country collects more talent, they'll have an influx of new ideas, new businesses and a better economy. For a society with a demographic problem - a growing retired population and fewer young people entering college and the workforce - qualified immigration is seen as a resolution to the problem as research shows that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany. "Keeping international students who have studied in the country is the ideal way of immigration," says Sebastian Fohrbeck."They have the needed certificates, they don't have a language problem at the end of their stay and they know the culture."
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 10 2015, @01:15PM
Perhaps the revolution will come here, first, and we won't have to.
Perhaps. The only successful business model for the past 40 years or so, has been find something people will "pay anything for" like health, education, "defense/public safety", housing, maybe cell phones, then charge them everything they got, squeeze all that blood from the stone cause they're dumb enough to pay anything for that so we'll screw them till they scream... Its the American Dream(tm) after all.
Now what is left as a tool to screw us over? Food? Cheap cars? Contraception? recreational drugs? The business model of the last 40 years is running out of things to screw us over. There just isn't that much left, not to mention most of the blood has already been squeezed from those stones. You only get to destroy the middle class once, unless you rebuild it somehow in between.
You can make a bunch of billionaires over the past 40 years by impoverishing a nation by screwing up their market for medical care, college, and houses. But how many billionaires can you make in the next 40 years by impoverishing a nation by exploding the price of condoms, beer, shitty corn syrup based food, and commuter cars? Not much, I figure. You can get a lot of buy in when the whole graduating class of Yale in years past will transfer a billion bucks each from the poor to their pockets, but when practically no one will get rich off a "condom bubble" its going to be hard to get buy in and cooperation, and greedy people are not known for cooperation even under ideal circumstances.
I don't think the existing economic model has long left to run. Hope the new one sucks less and the transition isn't too awful for my kids.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 10 2015, @03:52PM
Well said. In my mind's eye I see the best revolution being everyone voting with their feet, like what happened to East Germany when Hungary removed its border fence with Austria. Erich Honecker's regime simply collapsed. Everything was non-violent, except for when East Germans sacked the Stasi headquarters. Those guys had it coming, but even then I don't remember any of them being killed because they had lit out for the hills.
The American version I see is probably better called voting with dollars. Enough people put solar panels on their roofs and EVs in their driveways, and the fossil fuel industries that have had a stranglehold on America for 100+ years will collapse. Enough people 3D print what they need, recycling waste for feedstock, and all sorts of forms of centralized control collapse. That would probably be enough to erase this current model of economic production and the political system that pairs with it.
Washington DC delenda est.