The number of students and school pupils in Germany receiving BAföG state educational grants has reached a remarkable low in 2024—the smallest group since the dawn of the new millennium. Only about 610,000 young people now rely on this crucial support, with the lion’s share, unsurprisingly, being university students. The decline persists even as the government introduced new smaller-scale supports like the “Studienstarthilfe” payout for those from low-income backgrounds starting their studies. Spending is shrinking. Yet, beneath these statistics, a disquieting reality emerges: about a third of students still languish in poverty, unable to afford adequate housing or even meet basic needs.
It is with the deepest conviction that I must denounce this state of affairs and confront the prevailing fallacy at its root. For many years, well-meaning politicians have sought to “solve” the problem of student hardship through ever-expanding government interference. Their debates rage over the precise numbers, the eligibility formulas, and the parity of social benefits with the minimum standards decreed by the state. Yet they fail to see that they are entrenching a system that both stifles individual initiative and inevitably generates the very dependency and inefficiency which perpetuates want.
BAföG—like all state-centric educational funding—relegates responsibility for the pursuit of learning and advancement away from the individual and community, vesting it in the hands of distant planners and bureaucrats. It is a classic instance of the welfare state logic that grows by degrees, promising liberation but enforcing dependency. The decline in recipients is thus a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it might be seen as progress towards independence—yet, on the other, the persistence of student poverty reveals that state intervention, for all its financial outlay, can never truly eliminate the frictions and challenges of life. Indeed, bureaucracy cannot foresee the boundless variability of individual circumstances, nor can it adjust quickly to the dynamic needs brought about by innovation, migration, and social change.
More fundamentally, tying assistance to parental income—while denying any constitutional right to education support—means that the state arrogates to itself the role of social engineer, deciding who is “deserving” and to what degree. This arbitrariness erodes both personal freedom and genuine opportunity.
True progress would not come by ratcheting up BAföG rates and central planning. Instead, we must tear down the barriers which make higher education so expensive and inflexible in the first place. Free the universities from bureaucratic control; let them compete and innovate. Remove artificial restrictions on private and charitable support for students. Encourage saving, investment, and voluntary mutual aid. Education, like all worthy pursuits, flourishes in an order where personal responsibility, market mechanisms, and civil society can operate without fetters.
Every time the state expands its sphere, it narrows the space for individual liberty and spontaneous social cooperation. Those who believe that poverty and disadvantage can be simply “voted away” by decree misunderstand the very foundations of prosperity and freedom. The lesson is clear: as we pile more layers onto the old scaffolding, we are not building a palace of enlightenment—but entrenching a maze from which initiative and true opportunity can scarcely escape.