The Gap Between the Promise and the Paperwork
Germany’s BAföG—the federal student financial aid program introduced in 1971 under Willy Brandt’s government—was built on a straightforward premise: access to education shouldn’t depend on what your parents earn. Students who qualify receive a monthly grant, half of which is a loan and half of which never needs to be repaid. At its best, it’s a genuine mechanism for social mobility. At its current state, it’s mostly a system that fewer and fewer students can actually access.
The numbers are stark. In four years, the number of students and pupils receiving BAföG dropped by nearly 180,000 people—down to around 557,000 university students and 225,000 schoolchildren by 2017. This happened despite multiple rounds of reform: the Merkel government raised age limits for master’s programmes in 2010, exempted merit scholarships from benefit calculations, and announced in 2014 that rates would increase by seven percent starting in 2016. The increases happened. The recipients kept declining.
Part of the problem is structural. The income thresholds that determine eligibility persistently run behind the actual cost of living, particularly in cities where student rents have outpaced everything else. The proposed reforms—raising the maximum monthly grant from €735 to around €850 by 2020, increasing the housing supplement from €250 to €325—are welcome adjustments that still don’t address why students who should qualify are either not applying or not making it through the process. Only 590 students submitted their applications online in an eleven-month window. Five hundred and ninety. The digital application system is apparently such a disaster that people are still submitting paper forms, or giving up entirely.
The Greens’ education spokesman Kai Gehring called it a "fatal collapse" of one of the country’s most important equity laws—the kind of language politicians use when they’re right but lack the votes to do anything about it. The principle that the state has an obligation to fund education, not just endorse it rhetorically, is worth defending. Whether a reform bold enough to actually reverse the trend is coming remains an open question.