They’re cheating us!

April 01, 2020 / By mobanmarket

They’re cheating us!

Students in Germanophone Europe are restive and the Bologna process is being blamed for much of it.

Johannes Hahn, the new European commissioner for regional policy, left his previous job as Austria’s research and science minister just as the biggest student protests the country had seen in decades were fizzling out.

Hahn himself was the subject of particular criticism: “Hahn heißt er, uns bescheißt er” was a popular slogan used during the protests (leaving out a scatological pun on his name, this roughly translates as “His name is Hahn, and he’s cheating us”). In December, days after Hahn’s nomination to the Commission, police eventually removed the last remaining students – plus a large number of homeless seeking shelter from the freezing winter – from Vienna University’s main auditorium after they had occupied it for two months.

The protest movement was perhaps divided on its goals and poor at articulating them, but the serious challenges faced by Austria’s higher-education system are all too clear. Many of them are a side-effect of the so-called Bologna reforms, which have guided higher-education reform across Europe for the past decade. Bologna, which streamlined degrees across the 46 participating countries, has failed to bring relief to German-style universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, many of which are overcrowded and under-resourced and lack the autonomy from government to generate their own income or select their own students.

Opposition to Bologna now appears to have hardened among students in all three countries. “No one can force an academic reform against the will of the students,” protest-leaders in Munich said in November. But the rejection is being fed by very different concerns.

Many student protesters in Austria, Germany and Switzerland reject the broadly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model introduced by the Bologna reforms, which replaces German-style diplomas and degrees with bachelor’s and master’s degrees. They say that three-year bachelor’s courses are a poor substitute for degrees that were previously attainable, typically, in five years and that Bologna has replaced the flexibility and freedom of the old degree courses with the rigid teaching familiar to them from secondary school. The increased workload means that students have less time for intellectual pursuits – say, attending lectures in a field outside their own – or, indeed, for work outside academe. This is a sore point at a time when the introduction of student fees makes such work all but mandatory, at least for students without well-off parents. It has also made it more difficult to switch universities in the middle of a degree course.

Other students, meanwhile, complain that employers look down on bachelor’s degrees and that one of Bologna’s main goals – a better fit between higher education and the needs of the labour market – has therefore been missed. While the first group denounces the economic realities that have provided much of the momentum behind the reforms, the second group believes that such realities have not transformed their universities sufficiently. In the face of student protests, the education ministers of Germany’s 16 federal states revised some aspects of the implementation of the Bologna reforms in December, but this ‘reform of the reform’ is unlikely to placate most of the demonstrators.

Many students, especially those who act as spokespeople for the protesters, go much further and take an ideological view of the reform. They see a broader ‘Anglo-Saxon’ agenda at work behind the Bologna reforms, an agenda they refer to as a creeping ‘marketisation’ of higher education, which they describe as inherently hostile to academic freedom and the pursuit of subjects that are not easily put at the service of profit maximisation.

Indeed, in the minds of many students, the Bologna process has been inextricably linked to the introduction of tuition fees in Germany and Austria, even though the two are not directly connected. Leaders of student organisations are asking for better teacher-student ratios – a sore point particularly in Germany’s large universities, which have high drop-out rates and whose students, before Bologna, often graduated only in their late twenties. They are also demanding that student fees be scrapped. How these two goals can be achieved simultaneously – that is, where the extra funding should come from – is conveniently left out of the discussion.

Germany’s tuition fees, which were introduced in most federal states in the summer of 2007, are a modest €500 per semester. In Switzerland, they range from around €300 to around €700 and are set by the cantons, which are responsible for higher education. In Austria, a curious coalition of disparate forces scrapped the tuition fees of €363.36 per semester just before a federal election in 2008. Social democrats, Greens and the far-right Freedom Party all voted for the abolition.

The move has turned Austria into a kind of safety valve for Germany’s overburdened universities. Austria’s universities – like those in much of Switzerland – teach in German, so there are no major linguistic barriers. Unlike universities in Germany or Switzerland, they are free. And, again unlike German universities, they do not, as a rule, require certain minimum grades or impose other kinds of entry restrictions on prospective students. This is especially salient in subjects such as medicine or psychology, which are popular but have strict entry conditions in Germany.

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All these factors have made Austria an extremely attractive destination for German students, who made up 7.3% of the student body in Austria last winter. Half of the students in certain courses in cities close to the German border, for example Innsbruck and Salzburg, are German. This winter semester, the overall student population was 20% larger than the previous year, putting further strain on a system that was already bursting at the seams.

The introduction in 2006 of indirect national quotas for medicine has brought some relief but may soon again attract legal scrutiny from the European Commission and has not been extended to other fields. A political backlash against German students in Austria was therefore inevitable. Michael Spindelegger, the country’s foreign minister, has now said that he will seek a political solution with the Commission on entrance conditions.

Switzerland is also going through a tortured debate about Germans at its universities – but in this case, it is professors rather than students that are the target of recrimination. The anti-immigration Swiss People’s Party (SVP), riding high thanks to a successful referendum to ban the construction of minarets, is leading a campaign against ‘German nepotism’ at Swiss universities, especially in Zurich. In 2008, 34% of all professors at the University of Zurich held German citizenship, and the university hired 38 German and 26 Swiss professors. The dean of the university points out, however, that these figures fluctuate: last year, the roles were reversed, with 27 Swiss hires against 22 Germans. The university also brought in 14 professors from countries other than Switzerland and Germany. Most students appear untroubled by the strong German presence among their teachers and suggest that the quality of teaching is far more important than nationality.