Students shut classes in tuition protests

German students carry a banner saying, "Whoever doesn't pay, stays dumb." Students protest tuition hikes and complain that education costs fall on the poor and middle class. (Candice Novak/GlobalPost)

BERLIN, Germany — Students occupied seminar rooms. Banners hung in front of lecture halls. Students tacked 95 demands on the door of the school’s president.

After months of tension, tens of thousands of students and community members took to the streets last month to protest tuition hikes across the country.

Protests in Potsdam, Cologne, Munich, Dresden, Tubingen and other cities pressured the government to change its policies on increased student fees and restricted study and field opportunities.

At Freie Universitat and Humboldt University — two of the largest here — students slept in tents and sleeping bags. Normal university order ground to a halt.

At least 6,000 students and community members demonstrated peacefully through the city’s heart with signs reading “Bildung Statt Banken” — “Education Instead of Banks.”

“We won’t leave until our demands are met and the standards of education are raised,” one student said, standing in front of a row of comrades camping out in a Potsdam University lecture hall.

In a nationwide education strike, following on the heels of similar protests in Austria, students and university workers are demanding a stop to the privatization of education, a raise in student-aid monies, and an increase in the percentage of students accepted into master's programs, among others.

Protests took place in 35 cities and seemed to make an impact on government leaders.

In a reversal, Education Minister Annette Schavan vowed to raise the BAfoG — Federal Education and Training Assistance money — which students receive when they can prove their parents can’t afford to pay for living costs. Previously, she said a higher BafoG was out of the question.

Newspaper commentaries have been harsh. An opinion column from the Tagezeitung newspaper calls the plan to raise student fees a “poisonous gift.” The new, more conservative coalition government elected in September “will soon have a new lucrative customer base,” reads another column, of "the parents who want a good education possible for their children.”