GERMANY: Student surge hits institutions

Extra numbers of first-year students as a result of double school-leaving cohorts and the end of military conscription are hitting higher education in Germany with a vengeance.

While institutions in Cologne and elsewhere have resorted to various unusual measures to cope with the surge of students, the government is hailing huge enrolment numbers as a victory for its additional funding measures.

Institutions have been bracing themselves for a massive surge of students this winter semester as a shortening of secondary school education around a decade ago worked its way through the education system.

Added to this is a one-off peak in enrolments following the end of military conscription. Normally, prospective students doing service in the army would enter universities around 18 months later.

Contingency plans have been put in place at various institutions, with universities making arrangements with churches and cinemas to secure extra facilities for lectures or renting tents and portable modular buildings to accommodate students. Various new organisational concepts have been applied, too.

Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia's largest city, has around 60,000 students and boasts not only one of Europe's oldest institutions, the University of Cologne, but also Germany's largest university of applied science, Fachhochschule Köln (FH Köln). Its third publicly-funded institution is the German Sport University Cologne.

Last winter semester, the University of Cologne had around 38,000 students. Now, more than 1,000 additional first-year enrolments have joined its originally expected intake of about 5,000 this semester.

According to Cologne's rector, Axel Freimuth, there are roughly 50,000 applications for just 6,100 available study places. Freimuth is confident that with the new facilities it has rented, the university will be able to cope with the increase in students.

Application statistics can be deceptive, however. Originally, new software was to be introduced in Germany to sort out enrolment. But this went wrong, and school-leavers have had to apply to each university individually.

In a general panic response to the forecast flood of applicants, many applications were handed in not only to several institutions at once but also for several subjects, so that now many universities are still uncertain about how many first-year students they are really facing.

FH President Joachim Metzner said that additional funding via the Higher Education Pact and tuition fees had been used to recruit more staff. The number of scientific assistants had been trebled.

The Higher Education Pact was agreed between the federal and state governments in 2007 and is providing around EUR4.7 billion (US$6.47 billion) in extra funding for 2010-15 in its second phase. However, tuition fees have been scrapped in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The German Sport University Cologne is relying largely on modern Portakabin systems for seminar rooms and other purposes, in addition to its new buildings.

But Steffen Wittele, who heads the student secretariat, explained that the university had also come up with another solution to cope with student numbers: longer lecturing time. "Now, lectures and seminars start earlier and end later," said Wittele. "And block teaching events are sometimes held at weekends."

Metzner reckons that FH is losing EUR2 million a year though the abolition of tuition fees. The University of Cologne puts its figure at EUR3.8 million in this respect. However, compensatory funding from the North Rhine-Westphalian government does appear to be helping somewhat.

Students are facing problems with accommodation, with some having to commute up to 80 kilometres to the city. Cologne University's student union has called for the provision of more hostels. Funding for additional hostels to cope with present student numbers has also been demanded at national level by the president of the German Student Welfare Service, Achim von der Heyde.

Across the country, the Rectors' Conference, representing the heads of German universities, maintains that first-year enrolments will increase by 15% this year, so that around 500,000 people have started, or are starting, to study this year. Germany's total student population is just over two million.

Annette Schavan, the higher education minister, regards the huge surge of students as proof of policies applied so far really working, especially the Higher Education Pact. "We are demonstrating our reliability to students and higher education institutions with this measure," she said.

In her ministry's opinion, the record enrolment figures reflect the efficiency of institutions in responding to a rising demand.

"Now it is up to the states to see to it that the money arrives where it is really needed," Schavan said.