What is going on on Ludwigstraße today?

Opposite CADU at what I presume to be a uni building there are hundreds of spods walking about listening to rock music - is this some kind of student rally? The surrounding streets are swarming with bizzies (translation=cops). If it's a rally then what about? Ideas anybody? If it's political and they're going all anti-war left wing on us does anybody wanna come round mine, change into Union Jack shirts and DMs and go and start Munich's first big political dust up since 1945???

yeah i saw them on my way into the factory today..maybe they're handing out free soap?

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/artikel/908/21887/
About 10 000 people are protesting about cuts in further education and it is likely to block the Leopoldstr. this afternoon.
Katrina

Great. That's my way home. My window looks out to the back sadly or I could watch it all kicking off - I can hear Police sirens as I write. Hopefully going to give the soap dodgers a good kicking. Big C, can you hear me?!?

maybe the german's need to start contributing to their higher education. it's a priviledge not a right. they should work during their spring break, not always jaunta cross indonesia or flee to thailand.

Apparently the benevolent Mr. Stoiber has introduced a funding cut of about 10%. This doesn't affect established professors, but intermediate staff will be cut back. Also there will be no spending currently on any new books. They reckon that in about 6 months or so an interactive seminar which currently has about 30 students will be up about 90 or so due to staff cut-backs. Not a good situation.

My immediate argument was that if students had to pay for university then that would solve the problem.

I got the arguments against this:-
1. It's against the German constition as education is supposed to be free.
2. It would mean that not everybody would be able to go to university.

I gave:-
1. Change the constitution. It's not so hard to do.
2. Introduce a means testing process whereby those who can afford it pay it and those who can't can get government grants.

The means testing is never perfect as there are plenty of people whose parents have the money but won't pay it out for university. Those cases are generally the exception.

Basically it would to some extent deter the layabouts from going to university if they had to fund the whole thing themselves, it'd bring in the required cash and probably even less would be required from the government. People would have an incentive to finish college as soon as possible to avoid building up big debts and so cut out this business of spending 6 years doing an arts degree nonsense.

Boom, problem solved.

LOL, spoken like a true american

I agree with Keydeck, it should also be available to those who can't afford it, but it is a bit silly that Merc driving types also don't have to pay.

In Australia we have a system whereby university fees are paid after you finish university. Once you earn over a certain amount, you pay an extra 3% tax until it's paid off. It's not really noticeable and ensures that you can still study, even if you're too poor to at the time.

If you never earn above the threshold, or die, then you (or your estate) never has to pay it.

personally I favour a system of student loans- the government can then subsidise this by

a/ guaranteeing 90% of the loan principal (not interest) to banks (hence lowering the interest rate for the borrower's benefit), with recourse taken on defaulters through the tax system (i.e. if you can't pay coz you don't find a job the gov't pays for you so that banks have an incentive to continue the scheme since they do not incur the loss, but since the govt only subsidises 90% of principal and not the interest, they have an incentive to enforce payment so that they get all of their money - but as soon as a defaulter does find a job the govt claws back the money as tax, similar to the oz system)

b/ allowing tax deduction of interest and part of the principal repayment on these loans after graduation (--> incentive to graduate and start earning rather than slacking at uni until the age of 30) - some might argue that this is "anti-social" since high earners benefit more from tax deduction since you save tax at the marginal rate. one argument against that: it gives you an incentive to study something that has value for the economy and commands higher pay, hence improving the allocation of the higher education spending from an economic perspective. if you do not accept this argument, a remedy could be to allow deduction at a flat rate (e.g. the basic rate, such as is the case for VCT investment in the UK) as opposed to the marginal rate

having said all of this, university graduates already tend to pay for their studies once they start work since they tend to earn more than non-graduates and over a lifetime pay considerably more tax and are considerably less likely to draw unemployment benefit.

I'll get me coat

jordi, do you know the student-loan system in the u.s.? i'm overjoyous that they are down to less then 4%.

my mom raised my bro and i on her own and so i got government grants for school, but it only covered tuition. i still needed cash for books, health insurance etc., etc. so even those too poor to afford college have to contribute somehow to their education. in germany those who come from poor or low-income families should be given gov't grants, but education cannot remain free.

sorry, this is a sore spot with me. and yup mystery proud to be... god bless the u.s.a.! but there is a lot of talk today about changing the uni-system so a lot of what i say isn't new.

no not quite familiar with the student loan system in the US so can't comment.

but basically taking out a student loan is a simple investment decision as far as I see it: borrow now only if the expected future cost of paying principal and interest is lower than the expected future benefit of higher earnings through study. it improves the quality of teaching (since buyers know that the guy in front of the classroom is paid out of their hard-earned cash - and believe me it makes a difference: I went to business school at £18,000 a year for two years and if a prof was not up to scratch, we didn't stand for it. I also went to uni in belgium and spain, which cost less than €500 a year, and I hardly ever turned up for lectures since most of the profs were so bad) and hence the quality of graduates improves

since most people respond to incentives, and most people view receiving money as a reasonably attractive incentive, the govt can make this investment decision more attractive by subsidising (through tax rebates) "good" decisions (i.e. the more you earn, the more money you get back in tax savings, which makes sense since you are also generating more added value for society from a strictly economic perspective)

I dunno Jordigo, I think it is dangerous to apply such economic principles to Universities. I know from my time in Uni, all of the geniuses and guys who did the most interesting research were often the worst lecturers.

Has this system of competition helped the seconday school system in England?

yes. fee-paying schools are still getting the best gcse and a level results by far (even compared to government-funded institutions with selectivity). I was a governor of a (state) secondary school in wandsworth for a while so followed this issue quite closely during that period...

I agree. they do not belong in the classroom... but a well-funded institution can afford both lecture and teaching staff. and if it has good teaching staff it will attract more students willing to pay and continue to be well-funded. virtuous cycle

I'm with Jordigo, especially regarding his comments re: schooling. GCSE and A-Level scores are better at fee paying schools. Whether this has helped the secondary school system as a whole is debatable...

Gotta chuck in my 2 cents.

My tuition was paid for in the UK by the state, but I had to pay my rent, food and all that, so I got a job. I can only speak about the UK, but I heard people moaning about not having enough money, being a poor student blah blah blah, but they would not go and get a part time job, because they were too busy "studying". MY arse. I went to college about 4 hours a week on average, and passed like everyone else. If you are a student without time to get a part time job, because you are always "studying", then perhaps you are on the wrong degree and too stupid to get your work done quicker. For those that are doing a degree where they really feel that the workload is too much to get a PT job to, then take a loan out, or run a massive overdraft with your bank, they'll be more than happy to oblige. I like the sound of the Aussie system with an extra bit of tax apres-studies. Sounds good.

As for the argument "It would mean that not everybody would be able to go to university", I say, GOOD! Again I can only speak about the UK, but lets face it, a massive proportion of students are there not to learn, but to avoid going to work for a few more years. Nothing wrong with that attitude per se, but you can't expect tax payers to cover it.

Ok, but I was talking about the school system as a whole. Quantifying the success of the school system can have nothing to do with results. A school in a poor area may have overall poor results, but could have actually done a very good job of educating the students to the maximum of their potential.

The state paid my tuition fees too, and I, like you Don, had to pay my own rent, food etc. I managed that by working my arse off in a 9-5 job during the summer and winter breaks and saving every penny I earned.


I have to disagree with this. Between lectures, lab work, and homework, I never had time to do a part-time job while at University. I suspect the same is true for anyone who isn't studying something wooly like Art or Humanities.

Actually, I imagine that Art is a bit of a mre, due to all the coursework requirements, but anyway.

I get your point, I know people that also had to work their arses off over summers and stuff as they really did have very little time to spare duing term, but I stand by my opinion that a massive proportion of students are just plain lazy, and tax payers cash, even if only spent on tuition fees, is wasted on them.

you seem to imply that you can and should expect less of poor people just because they are poor and supposedly have less potential? interesting...

Jordigo, if I was a politician I would say you were being disingenuous Ok leave out the poor bit:
A school may have overall poor results, but could have actually done a very good job of educating the students to the maximum of their potential.

Hi All,

I drove down there yesterday..

Who is going to pay for the clean up after the Litter louts!!!

Sod their 10% cut,

Get a JOB

G

Here's a bit of a different perspective on the whole issue. It's not just their own pocketbooks the students are concerned about, but also the immediate impacts that these cuts have on the quality of their education. If they have to pay more tuition, that's one thing. If there is nobody to teach them, that's a whole other thing.

With the funding cuts, non-essential staff are being booted. This translates into graduate students; the ones who actually lead recitation sessions and labs. They are heavily relied on to make the system run. A similar analogy would be the ever-increasing reliance on nurses instead of doctors in hospitals.

Graduate student workloads may vary widely from field to field, but in many areas, including my own, the grad students are already overloaded to the point that their professional progress suffers in comparison with that of grads in other countries. I know several grads who won't be paid come January, and who have chosen to continue their studies in other countries as a result. I don't know how you say "brain drain" in Bairisch, but that would be the appropriate phrase to insert here.

A major consequence of the cuts will be that grad staff will leave Bavaria in droves, as will the students who won't have a full complement of labs/recitations and who consequently risk having their studies prolonged.

Fortunately I'm no longer a grad student, but since I'm still in academics, I see that the short-term consequences could have long-term drawbacks; especially since most grad programs tend to draw almost exclusively from the undergraduate pool. How do you say "feedback loop" auf Bairisch? The Stoiber high-tech miracle will come to an end by the time he's left the state for a higher position...

That being said, I personally have problems sitting still when people bellyache about the state not providing unlimited manna from heaven, but that's a whole other post..

Why?

@karambos
I don't know if it's a privilege, given that you're stuck indoors studying on Friday, out I'm pretty sure that it's not a right either - rights to me mean things that the government won't do to people, at least to it's own citizens, the Bill Of Rights stuff.

They're all rights that you have by default, in the absence of any goverment.

The right to education is different because education isn't the default state of things - the goverment doesn't really have much control over it, and it seems to make a hash of the bits it does.

/spent too much time reading the Economist when I had flu, totally brainwashed.

So who should pay for education?

the state
private enterprise
the individual
?

the individual

that is so "duh" that it astonishes me that anyone even doubts the obviousness of it...

the reason being: the "state" *never* pays for anything. the TAXPAYER (i.e. the individual) does.

the only difference is that when "the state" pays the beneficiary does not realise that for every cent spent on them, someone had to get up early, go to work and pay taxes for them to be able to enjoy their perceived "right" to education

it puzzles me that there are still smart people around who apparently still believe there is such a thing as a free lunch...

To me it is 'duh' that the point of taxation is spreading the burden and not to provide a few slackers with a free lunch.

What do you think about the idea that industry should pay because it receives and has been receiving for decades, the fruits of a skilled workforce for free?

industry "receives" nothing for free. it pays gewerbesteuer, umsatzsteuer, steuersteuer (not a joke, solizuschlag is a tax on tax!), right-to-breathesteuer and so on and so forth

it employs a skilled workforce wherever it can purchase its services at a reasonable price. if that cannot be germany (because some "green" politician comes up with more freaky ideas, like forcing a minimum number of "ausbildungsplatze" or an education tax or a "wealth tax" on them), it will be somewhere else (outsourcing to india, anyone?)

there are roughly 4.3 million reasons why making "industry" pay for additional stuff is a cr@p idea

personally i think schroeder should go for a massive re-armament programme. cuts unemployment at a shot...it works believe me..

Re-armament, motorways and big get-togethers in Nuremburg. That's what this country needs more of. That and Lebensraum.

Why is there any need for higher education in germany?
all the f**kers i deal with here seem to know it all anyway.

so we have:

So it would seem, as far as I understand you, the public sector needs the private sector's tax to pay for education and the private sector needs the public sector's skilled labour. Private hands pay for it's own workforce, so to speak.

But then we have:


So who's paying? It would seem, that private enterprise pays and so does the individual. Then the whole lot gets thrown into one big pot and divided up.

So who gets to say what's done with the money?

Enterprise benefits from the educated, literate labour force provided by the state.

The individual benefits by being rewarded in relation to his/her level of education through developing the skills that are most highly valued and using that in industry.

Society also benefits by developing a flexible, literate labour force that can adapt to technological change.

By saying "if the individual is going to benefit, let them pay for it!" several problems get swept under the carpet:

1)The poor and disadvantaged can't provide for their education and until they do, they will remain where they are.

2)Talent is only drawn for a minority of the population. There may be talent in other sectors of society, but it is never developed. This may suit the already successful and their heirs, but will eventually produce an imbalanced society of self-replicating elites.

Progression will not be achieved as long as success depends upon the ability to pay for entrance to education. Those with talent, but not the means to pay, will be excluded from competition. Society will lose and in the long run industry will lose.

in a perfect world, the electorate. in an imperfect world (i.e. the real world) elected politicians. duh...


bollox for example if you issue study loans that are repaid (for example in the form of extra tax, as in Oz) after one starts earning --> no up-front cost and gives an incentive to study something that is valued enough so as to lead to decent earning power

bollox as per above


bollox again. if you are successful e.g. in that you run a company, you have an incentive to attract talent so as to assist you in perpetuating this success. this is what provides you with the best return on capital. in fact, if you are successful enough to have loadsamoney, you let smart people work for you and keep your offspring in a place where they can do no harm if they are not smart. it is cheaper to pay them a big allowance than to let them destroy the family fortune


bollox if you organise things in a smart way, i.e. by ensuring people pay for their education *after* the fact --> eliminates barriers to entry and incents people to choose wisely what / where / how long to study

where I went to business school, a majority of students could not afford to pay the £36,000 in school fees + cost of living in London for 2 years with no income out of their own pockets. they took out loans since the assumption was that your increased earning power more than pays for the loan servicing

what I don't feel is reasonable is to demand that the taxpayer stump up for the "right" that some people (esp around here) feel that they have to study "native greenlandian studies" for 12 years at society's expense. such frivolity should be the preserve of people who have spare time / money but ought not be funded by hard-working people everywhere who get up early every day to provide for their families and to whom every £ in tax paid to such slackers is a £ less spent on *useful* things

Ok, but the Government could borrow the money, loan it to them and get them to pay it very slowly once/if they are no longer poor and disadvantaged.

so those with no money have to study something the market requires where as the those with enough wealth can study

if they want because they can afford to. Hardly "free choice".


Perhaps I wasn't clear enough about what I meant as your reply seems to reenforce what I said about self-replicating elites.

What I meant was roughly summarised: the rich get an education and the rich get to send their kids to school. The poor don't. In your reply you said "if you are successful you can ... perpetuate your success"

personally I feel that if someone wants to study something that will not lead to them generating any tangible value in return they need to work (first, during or after) their studies to pay for it. that *is* free choice, but it means that people actually carry the consequences of their choices: "I can choose to study native greenlandian fishing culture for 12 years, but I need to think about whether it is a sensible use of my time and resources" as opposed to "I feel like it and the taxpayer should stump up"

and you misunderstood my other point: the point is, what the rich do or do not do does not matter. what matters is: if you want to study you can afford to if you have loans at your disposal that you can pay off with future earnings. whether the guy sitting next to you just happened to inherit a million and does not have a loan is of no consequence to your choice. what is important is that *you* pay for *your choices* and if something does not make sense for you when you have to pay for it yourself then why does it start making sense when the taxpayer pays for it? that is like saying "well I wouldn't drive a ferrari (as frivolous as studying "native greenlandian fishing culture" for 12 years one might argue) if I had to pay for it, but I shouldn't have to pay for it myself. the taxpayer should subsidise my right to drive a ferrari. otherwise I do not have "free choice" between cars"

well not this tax-payer...

Just to stick my nose into this:


Why should all studies be of tangible (I'll read here: translateable into monetary value of earnings per hour) value? Is the world a better or worse place for having art, theater, music, etc.? Those are certainly things that you can't quantify on your value table. Yet, if someone goes and tries to earn enough money before doing these things to then study them, it's hardly likely to happen.

I think everyone should have to pay off their loans, but I also believe that education should be subsidised. You can't judge what is of value and what isn't.

erm... they are actually...

there are plenty of foundations, sponsors, galleries, private collectors, theatre producers and visitors, etcetcetcetc who pay for / provide for the arts (guggenheim, tate, thyssen-bronemisza, courtauld, lord sainsbury, king ludwig I, etc are / were all individuals who paid for art and as such enabled artists to live and in the process quantified the value of their work by buying it for their collection)

there are plenty of galleries in all sorts of places that offer young artists ways of getting their work out there and sell it. even here in munich I have been to several exhibitions of young artists' work sponsored by private companies (law firms, VC firms, whatever)

go to any theatre or concert production in London or New York and look at the programme: an endless list of benefactors / sponsors (individuals and companies)

PS: I don't aim to judge what is of value and what is not. the *only* measure of value is the market: if someone is willing to pay for it then it is of value (perhaps there is a huge market out there for the services provided by experts in native greenlandian fishing and my example was ill-chosen? in which case I humbly stand corrected...)

The problem with the market is that it is driven by people and:
1. People are stupid
2. People can be manipulated
3. People want stuff now

It's a question of emphasis and weighting. The position of the university as a place of research away from the demands of the market is in my opinion a healthy one. Can you not see that letting the market influence what the universities research (although it has already happened to some extent) would (and will) radically alter their research profile, making them tend more towards projects with better chances of short term gain and those with smaller risks. Most scientific discoveries have little immediate short term value (in terms of money), and some absolutely none. Is not the pursuit of a greater understanding of the world undriven by consumer pressures not a desirable ideal?

And anyway, value can be better measuerd as that which improves human life. If the university system as it now exists had not so existed for the last couple of hundred years, we would still be living in the dark ages. Or put another way, keeping the market out of the university is in the long term interests of the market.

ermm... not really. some of the best fundamental research is being done at places like bell labs, IBM, etc and much of the best research in terms of biotechnology is done by companies, not research institutes (example: the solving of the DNA puzzle, phenomenally accelerated by that icelandic company)

and let's not forget that harvard, stanford and (originally) pretty much all oxford and cambridge colleges are (were) privately endowed (just to illustrate that liberal arts also stand a chance in a privately endowed world)

what you are right about is that privately funded research puts more demands on researchers to provide results. one could (and I do) argue that that merely means that people are exposed to scrutiny insofar as producing tangible outcomes (i.e. publish) is concerned

but anyway this is now far off-topic and I will stop posting on this now since I think my view is rather clear at this point.

ceterum censeo that german students are slackers and deserve a slap across the face for moaning about uni fees

Yeah well if you just wanted to outline your views you could have stopped a long time ago. If you want to convince anybody (me) them I am afraid you must write on.


Every finished PhD is published.

Anyway, my views are pretty close to yours (it's that 100% conviction that always gets me): I just think there is place for market driven research and pure research, sometimes (as in MIT and the like) in the same insitution.

all right then...

true, I was referring more specifically to people who work on grant-funded projects as post-docs and as part of their work as professional researchers - as you probably know even a lot of research at universities is grant-funded, which is often how profs keep their post-docs (barely) alive

my point is that "market driven" needn't mean "with an immediate commercial application" - there is quite a significant "market" for fundamental research, and IMO the most efficient way to allocate resources is to let that "market" decide what gets funded and what does not... and pressure to perform (publish results that are in line with what was "promised" as part of the grant application, roughly to timescales) is a good thing. focuses the mind...

as part of my brief stint in german venture capital I have come across an astonishing number of "professors" who appear to work full-time on all sorts of things other than research or university work, but still have tenured positions (for which they presumably get some money and to which, in the worst case, they can go back) because there is no pressure on them there to produce anything.

Ok, let the market decide when it comes to the market for fundamental research, but there is still valuable research that falls outside of this category. Like I said, there is room for both.

Try and find a few exceptions to your argument rather than trying to bend everything to your argument.

like what?

that question isn't answerable until you've defined "valueable". You said:


Why?

Your problems now are semantic - I think Jordigo rates vaule differently to you - he takes a much more 'cash' oriented approach, whereas I think you view the subject as a more 'value to humanity' way.

So in that sense, Jordigo is dead right - the market is the only thing that can decide value in purely monetary terms. Defining value in a more alturistic manner (if you'll allow me to slightly mis-use the term altruism here) is much much more difficult, and I would say, perhaps impossible.

Since it was me that started this thread, basically in the hope of having a fight with some student types, can I also just say that I am amazed at how it has grown into a debate about higher education.

Right, carry on...

I am sensing some Ayn Rand philosophies here.

Ok, that should end the thread.

Naw, not really, I just think there are different measures of value just as well as quality. It would be indeed be a sorry state of affairs if one guy got to set what was valuable and what was not. That is why not all research is market driven, its value being defined in terms of money generating woth, some is driven by a measure of 'interestingness' or indeed 'altruistic' measures of its quality.

Alllllll, that said: I am agreeing with Jordigo in saying that the University system is perhaps not guided enough by the market, but that is changing. We differ to the extent that I don't think that it should ever be 100% market driven.

if so, then there will in all likelihood be someone out there willing to endow it... and the amount they are willing to spend on it determines its value to that person.

the alternative is some board of "wise men" pissing away other people's (read: taxpayers') money on stuff that is neither

a/ interesting enough to attract anyone willing to put their own money behind it
b/ likely to generate a return