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You Can Now Go to College in Germany for Free

The title is a little misleading.

It's not totally free. It's "Tuition Free" and there are other costs to going to college, but still is a damn sight better than what we do here.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/...dents_why.html

Quote:

Last week, Lower Saxony made itself the final state in Germany to do away with any public university tuition whatsoever. You read that right. As of now, all state-run universities in the Federal Republic—legendary institutions that put the Bildung in Bildungsroman, like the Universität Heidelberg, the Universität München, or the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin—cost exactly nichts. (By the way, they weren’t exactly breaking the bank before, with semester fees of about EUR 500, or $630, which is often less than an American student spends on books—but even that amount was considered “unjust” by Hamburg senator Dorothee Stapelfeldt.)

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[QUOTE=Tom Joad;246739]The title is a little misleading.

It's not totally free. It's "Tuition Free" and there are other costs to going to college, but still is a damn sight better than what we do here.

Are there grants for students from low income families? We've got this in the U.K. but qualifing isn't as easy as it sounds. Student loans are available and have to be paid back but only after your wages cross a threshold. This explains it better.

http://www.studentloanrepayment.co.u..._schema=PORTAL

How does this compare to the USA?

Grants have been getting harder to get here. Student loans are easily available, but must be paid back regardless, for the most part. There are special programs of loan forgiveness for particular public service--teaching in inner cities, etc. But these, we've been hearing here, are subject to lax or corrupt administration that can leave the borrower holding the bag.