Why doesn't Germany just raise its requirements to get into a university course?

Question

As a follow up to this question: If large population of students in German universities are failing anyways, why not just require an entrance test for courses? Is there any reason Germany hasn't implemented this?

(Edit) I realize I should have elaborated why I recommended testing. In the place where I come from(India), well more like in 90% of Asian countries, testing is a critical part of process of getting into university. In the particular place I come from, one could argue that the emphasis on testing arises from an actual lack of university seats, but even if one talks of more developed Asian countries, for example, Korea and China, still you'd find the same. For example, the suneung or Gaokao in China.

And, I have an interest to study in Germany, and hence the questions arose as an interest to know why things are the way are in this country.

Answer 1

There are a number of reasons, but the most important one is that the German constitution, the Basic Law, guarantees the freedom to chose one's profession as a fundamental right in Art. 12 (1.1).

Based on this provision, Germany's Federal Constitutional Court strictly limited the legal room for maneuver for restrictions on access to public universities in the famous Numerus Clausus Judgment of 1972 (BVerfGE 33, 303). Since then, the jurisprudence has evolved, but generally speaking, limitations such as minimum admission grades (sometimes not quite correctly referred to as Numerus Clausus) are only permitted when there is a demonstrable shortage of positions that cannot be fixed in the short term. In general, everybody with Abitur must be given the same access to a place to study.

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Edit by @ccprog, as invited in the comments: I'd like to add a few details about the actual procedures.

1. There are two seperate processes for admission to programs with restricted access: a central admission for all German universities by contract between the state governments, and local admission on proposal by individual universities and governed by state regulations.

2. Both types are under the restriction to actually prove that the number of admissions are really exhausting the university's capacity to teach students. From my own time involved in these matters, I know that universities each year had to admit 10% or more above the initial numbers on court orders. (There are actually law firms that make a living on asserting admittance for refused applicants on these sort of grounds.)

3. The Numerus Clausus might not be the sole basis of admittance. Most states have laws that allow additional criteria besides the Abitur grade. As an example, in Berlin universities first fill 20%–30% of the places with reseved quota like foreign students and applicants with a completed vocational training. Then, at most 60% of the places are filled by admittance criteria determined by the university and approved by the state administration. All other places are filled according to the Numerus Clausus and the number of semesters the applicant had to wait since his first petition ("waiting time").

   Mind you, most universities don't bother to design special admittance criteria and just use the Abitur grade for everyone. First, short of interviewing everyone individually the results probably won't differ, and second, it is just too costly to do all this testing.

Answer 2

First: Most people don't fail university in Germany, it is very much dependent on the topic.

Concerning your suggestion of an entrance exam: education is a state-level competence in the federal system of Germany, that is each of the 16 Bundesländer can decide on how primary and secondary education is organized in their state (of course not completely but to a certain extent). As a result the levels of knowledge in certain subjects at Abitur level varies considerably between the Bundesländer. As an example, when I started studying, my Abitur math level from southern Germany was such that almost all of the first semester Analysis 1 course I already knew from school while some of my co-students from other Bundesländer hadn't heard any of it before.

Due to this federal education system, implementing generalized entrance exams would be very unfair and would skew the admittance in favor of those that were more "lucky" in where they grew up.

Answer 3

henning has already given the most important answer why nobody bothers to take the legal hurdles.

A few other practical or political hurdles include:

• The top-tier high school diploma (Abitur) is generally regarded as a sufficient selection criterion to avoid an overflow of students. That being said, you can also enroll at a university if you complete a vocational training, with details left to the states and universities.

• Implementing another countrywide admission test would meet political opposition: it costs money, it would be considered too bureaucratic, and meet opposition by angry middle class parents. And if any politician dares messing with their kids' Abitur, they get very, very angry.

• That being said, the Abitur isn't a perfect selection criterion either. It's considerably easier to get in some parts of the country due to uneven educational policies in each state. A national college entry exam (similar to SAT in the US) would meet with opposition by the lower-ranking states. The pressure isn't that high since most students don't move too far away from their home area, typically staying within their state.

• In that sense, the college entrance exam is basically deferred to the individual university. It's not uncommon to switch programs after a semester or two, and I know people who enrolled in several programs for the purpose of checking them out.

• Another important difference to the US, India, or China: the quality of the universities is much more even. There are a few top-tier universities but generally speaking the variability in quality of the programs is not nearly as huge as in other countries. The reasons are probably political/historical. Generally speaking, a 'university' in Germany compares to an R1 college/university in the US.

Answer 4

Why should they?

Your base assumption in that question is that a) many people failing early on is bad and b) a universal entry exam would somehow change this.

Regarding a) : A lot of courses (usually those with ease of providing high capacity because no practical stuff is necessary) intentionally have a low barrier of admittance (because they have capacity this is constitutionally required), but make up for that by challenging the students intensely in the first couple of semesters (causing many to fail). This is not a bad thing. It doesn't judge people on the performance on a singular day & test but instead on their ability to (and implied likelihood of) finish the course. This also allows for students with bad school performance to get their act together and ignores failure in fields irrelevant to the actual studies. If you CAN admit a lot of people (because the first few semesters allow for mass processing of students), why wouldn't you?

b) a universal entrance exam (completely universal like the Chinese one or per-subject?) wouldn't change this without exorbitant cost in terms of students that would have made the course but failed the exam. If the bar for this test is set too high, it is unconstitutional may fail people because of irrelevant subjects (a math-focused student might fail the German part for example) or for poor performance years past. It also prevents people from checking out a subject and deciding for themselves that they either dislike it, or have to work harder for it than previously. Especially the latter is impossible with a test you likely can take once as a teenager when you didn't really care for education (or for a specific field that in the end motivates them to try hard enough).

Answer 5

The other answers do not explicitely mention this, but in some fields it has actually been common for decades to have some rather strict secondary school grade requirements. E.g. in medicine, veterinary medicine, psychology, architecture etc. That is the numerus clausus mentioned in henning's answer.

For several years it has also been common to supplement this requirement for good Abitur grades with entrance tests, at least in medicine (source in German, though arguably in the arts some kind of entrance testing has been common for decades).

Most STEM fields except biology do not have such requirements because demand for student positions is not so high most of the time. A high rate of failure then usually means that the field is inherently very difficult. However, it is sometimes alleged that exams are made more difficult if the number of first-term students is much higher then expected, in order to have fewer students in the later terms.

Answer 6

There are some subjects that have restrictions like this, mostly those with limited capacity like medicine. For those your final high school grade (Abitur) are typically used, which likely results in a selection similar to the one some aptitude test would create.

My impression is that this is simply not seen as a problem. It is arguably a more fair system than the alternatives. Your ability to succeed in the subject is measured by the actual courses and not by a proxy like some general aptitude test or by some subjective and potentially biased manual selection of candidates.

Difficult subjects also tend to put some of the difficult parts into the first semester, so you will usually know pretty quickly whether you're doing well or not. It does waste some time for students that pick a subject they don't succeed in, but usually not too much of it. And university is free in Germany, so the financial consequences are limited.

Answer 7

Western vs Eastern State Sponsored Education

What you are describing is a very common phenomenon in Western style public education as a whole, not just Germany. Despite socialized college education, Germany is still by-in-large a capitalist country in the way that it manages its public services. In most Western school systems, the government pays for tuition and grants, not directly for the operating costs. When the government only pays for tuition, it means that the schools still need to compete for funding, and the most important metric for determining funding is how many students you serve.

For example, if you have the facilities and staff for 5000 students, but only 3000 pass the entrance exams because they are so difficult, then the school is still stuck paying for thier larger facility but with less income; so, it is in the best interest of the school to always fill every available seat. So, to balance the budget, state sponsored universities set thier entrance requirement to the minimum it takes to guarantee 100% enrollment, not based on what it takes to complete the coursework. In the inverse case where a school has the facilities and staff for 3000 students, but they get 5000 who pass the entrance exams, then there is a financial incentive to accept over thier capacity, and use some of the extra funding to expand thier facilities until they can host 5000 students. In this way, there is a supply-demand function in the way Western schools operate that encourages them to always accept the maximums number of students that they can and to grow to the capacity of the market.

In contrast, Eastern states operate based on the Communists economic model in which schools are given a fixed budget and are required to function within it. So, if an Eastern school is budgeted to serve 3000 but has 5000 applicants that should be able to complete the coursework, then they are not able to collect 5000 tuitions from the State and use the money to expand the school system. Instead, they can only accept the best 3000 until the government chooses to expand thier funding. On the inverse, where they have 5000 seats and only get 3000 applicants that can pass the entrance exam, there is typically no penality for only accepting those 3000 applicants because they are still doing thier jobs within the budget allotted.

This puts the financial incentive for many Eastern Schools to operate by accepting as few students as the government will allow them to whereas Western Schools operate by accepting as many as are allowed.

A second major difference is the contrast between Populist Socialism and Communist Socialism. Communism Socialism which is most popular in East Asia is based on the original Marxist view that "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". This means that Communist Socialists have no expectation that all people have the same abilities, opportunities, and needs which leads to a strong cultural bias toward only uplifting those who show merit. In contrast, Populist Socialism which is the primary form of Socialism found in Western Nations, is based on the view that the government is responsible for making sure that all people have the same opportunities regardless of thier current ability and background. This fundamental difference has influenced the goals and laws of the Western vs Eastern systems.

Germany Specifically

There is also a more recent cultural element to German education that they try to make it as non-competitive as possible. Competitive learning environments are experimentally shown to reduce the effectiveness of education, and Germany is among the top nations when it comes to applying this principle. In Germany, there is a much greater belief that a person can fail one test, and still move on to achieve great success down the road, even when compared to other Western cultures. So, while East Asian countries have built thier public education system around minimizing how much they need to invest, Germany has built thier system around maximizing the possible return on thier investment.

Answer 8

Actually a study by the German Academic exchange service made a similar conclusion on reducing the drop out rates:

Die Phase vor der Ankunft in Deutschland sowie die individuellen Erwartungen und Motive der internationalen Studierenden werden bislang zu wenig beachtet pg -58

The phase before the arrival in Germany and the individual motives and expectations of international students are not considered yet.

Eine Verschärfung der Zulassungskriterien wäre ein einfacher, aber nicht unproblematischer Weg zur Senkung der Abbruchquoten bei internationalen Studierenden. pg-60

Enforcing stricter acceptance criteria would be an easy, yet not unproblematic way of lowering the drop-out quota of international students.

Furthermore, they have made later in the document a classification of the type of students who fail in their studies after coming to Germany with a detailed analysis.

Answer 9

Germany has its own culture and cultural preferences, so comparing it to examples from different continents makes not much sense. Irrespective what Germans think the general benefits can be:

• Above a certain level, tough entrance examinations just moderately correlate with the ability of students to be productive professionals.
• Strict entrance rules often tie down students to a certain education path, while many prefers course during to uni years, taking up new majors etc.
• Strict entrance exams often create wrong incentives to students, favors rich kids with private tutors, and there are a lot of other social consequences.