NATIONS SUCH AS THE UK, Australia and Canada compete fiercely to attract foreign students — and the ability of universities to attract overseas students is an increasingly important factor in immigration policy debates in these countries. Now, Germany’s new coalition government wants to raise the number of overseas students in the country to 350,000 by 2020 — up from the present 280,000. Simultaneously, it aims to enable 50 percent of German higher education students to undertake some study abroad.
The coalition’s internal treaty says the government will achieve this by making increased use of resources through the state-funded German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation which promotes international collaborations among German higher education institutions.
The treaty was finalised in late December after three months of negotiations between chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling centre-right Christian Democratic Union, its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and the centre-left Social Democratic Union. In it, the government pledges to internationalise higher education by attracting more students from outside the European Union to German universities and by sending German students to study abroad.
The number of foreign students in Germany has doubled since 1995, from 140,000 to 280,000 at the start of the 2013 academic year. Of these, about 95,000 are of non-EU origin, according to DAAD. Now, Merkel’s government, with the help of DAAD and the German National Association for Student Affairs (DSW), intends to boost recruitment of foreign students by 25 percent to reach 350,000 by the end of the decade. “Our aim is to attract the international academic elite to Germany to study, complete their doctorates or engage in academic research,” says Margret Wintermantel, DAAD’s president. “At the same time, we have to send our students to the world’s best universities to get global qualifications and international experience.”
Currently, about a third of Germany’s students go abroad for language courses, internships or university exchanges (400,000 German students start courses each year and 133,800 spend part of their studies abroad, according to the latest figures from 2011). Wintermantel wants government to allocate more funds for bursaries and scholarships abroad.
Although the US and the UK are still the top two destinations for foreign students heading abroad, Germany now ranks third ahead of Australia, according to the latest Education at a Glance report of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
A major attraction of studying in Germany is low or non-existent tuition fees. Many German states had phased them out by October last year. However, there are growing demands from some institutions to charge tuition fees to overseas students to augment funding.
Wintermantel is firm on this issue. “This is not the answer. The solution is to amend our Constitution so that the (federal) government can provide sustained funding for higher education in Germany,” she says. The German Constitution, or Basic Law, currently bars the federal government from financial or political involvement in school or higher education policy.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)