anon_7523

I guess, he is talking about the mindest, that you can fix everything with rules, without fixing the underlying problem (that I don't see in this case).

I would add calling something "typical German" is also typical German :)

I think you are essentially confusing "tech" with "web" (granted SV mostly does the same). Go to Southern Germany, if you want tech jobs, not Berlin.

There are good tech jobs in Germany. They are not SV-level paying, but rents are also not San Francisco level and you get healthcare, pension funds and unemployment benefits. Of course it can always be better.

What better than German tech jobs are there in the UK? It is not about the jobs. They are aiming for a language they already know, but want to get a free education on the way.

My point is, that taxpayers should benefit from their investments. There is nothing wrong with creating a lock-in, which is silly btw.: There is a German speaking market of > 100 Mio speakers, you can benefit from. Nobody in the Philippines or India speaks German. See what kind of job opportunities Turkish-German people have in Turkey.

If your point is true and there are no tech-jobs, we can benefit from it, then stop the program and work on that first. The foreign students also would, because except for 3 neighborhoods in Berlin and Frankfurt, you cannot integrate into German society without some German language knowledge and without a proper skillset.

The German economy is heavily based on the Mittelstand with so called "hidden champions", one does not know about, but who are the global market leader in smaller, obscure markets. They often sit in a village somewhere in rural (but rich) Southern Germany. No way, you can make it there without German language knowledge.

I have seen the opposite of that, some of this is I could prove, for example that they get better conditions in dorms.

My personal experience says, that it is not working out. I cannot tell for the whole country, but I do have some insights, since I am hiring and interviewing students and studied in one of the universities mentioned elsewhere in the thread. There is an English speaking Master program, consisting almost entirely of Pakistani and Indian students. Some facts about them:

- They are not required to learn German, so they speak very little to sometimes none at all. - They can only pick companies where speaking only English is tolerated. - Since they speak English, they tend to stick to themselves and cannot integrate. Some of them have a hard time even ordering food. - Indian Bachelor degrees are not comparable to German degrees. I have the feeling that there are some good universities, but others are nowhere near the German standard. Their skill levels are usually lower than these of their German counterparts. It makes sense: I have talked to people, who came from a small village and used a computer in their undergraduate course for the first time. - When you talk about their plans, it becomes clear, that they aimed for the US or the UK and took Germany only for the price and are often not planning to stay, but to take the next opportunity to board a plane to the US.

At the moment I do not think it makes any economical sense for Germany. I would do the following:

- mandatory German language courses - mandatory German language knowledge, even for English speaking courses - much stricter admission standards, individual tests instead of trusting non-EU standards - better integration with the labor market - maximum to the number of months you can stay in a dorm (already the case for German students) - initiatives to form German + foreign flat shares (primary way of living for students in Germany)

At the moment we are just sending the bad students back home and the good students to the US, after they got a free education here.

The local university close by reacted and increased the required GRE test scores to Ivy League level. The admissions dropped by an order of magnitude.

Germany is very social-democratic when it comes to education, so politicians avoid the word "elite", but when it comes to picking talent, you really should not. I think Germany should capitalize on the political climate in other countries and pick quality over quantity. A tax paid university should not be a third-world aid program.