Fewer Students, More Promises

Around the same time the German government promised to fix BAföG—that post-war commitment to fund education for anyone who needed it—fewer students could actually access it. That paradox is the whole thing.

BAföG started in 1971, genuinely radical for the era: the state would pay for your education if you couldn’t. Full grant, not a loan. The implicit contract was simple: your circumstances at birth don’t determine your ceiling. It worked that way for a long time. Then it didn’t.

By 2017, the numbers had fallen almost 180,000 over four years. Students and teenagers who qualified just stopped getting help. This happened while the government was raising the maximum benefit, adjusting the age limits, promising bigger reforms—all the things you’re supposed to do when a system’s failing. The rhetoric and the reality had completely separated.

I think what gets me is how perfectly German it all is. The earnest bureaucracy of it. Ministers releasing five-year plans for percentage increases that somehow never catch up to living costs. Only 590 people filed BAföG applications online in an entire year because the system was too broken to use. You could point to any individual reason—maybe the income thresholds were outdated, maybe the documentation required was absurd, maybe kids just gave up. It doesn’t matter. The system that was supposed to guarantee opportunity had quietly stopped doing that.

What stays with me is watching it happen in real time while everyone in power insisted they were fixing it. That gap between the promise and what was actually happening. The system still exists, I’m sure the reforms went through eventually, the numbers probably improved. But there’s something sad about a social promise you can watch failing while the government is actively trying to fix it. Something that makes you wonder what else works that way.