At some point Antonia Hagedorn had enough of student life. After completing her bachelor’s degree in economics, she wanted to make money, move out of home, and live her own life. She moved from Dresden to Düsseldorf, worked for a year as a tax assistant in a law firm and then realized: something is missing.
“In tax law, it’s extreme: When you work on a case, the employees tell you how to do it, or you orientate yourself on previous years. But I wanted to understand why you do something and how and on what legal basis it is based, “says the now 27-year-old. That is why Hagedorn decided to continue studying – for the part-time study “Taxation” at the private FOM University.
In the evenings and on weekends she had lectures at the university, and during the day she continued to work in the office. That way, she had both a serious job and a degree. She is currently writing her master’s thesis and is doing her 40-hour week on the side. “Studying alongside work is very exhausting. But you know why you are doing it and you always have to keep in mind that it is only for a good three years,” explains Hagedorn.
As a part-time student, she belongs to a small minority: only 214,000 of the students in Germany did this part-time in the 2018/19 winter semester, as reported by the Federal Statistical Office – this corresponds to 7.5 percent of all enrolled students. According to the Center for Higher Education Development CHE, half of the part-time students use the fee-based offers from private universities, the other half use state-owned ones – with almost every second student being enrolled at the state distance-learning university in Hagen.
Part-time students lose their entitlement to student loans
There are more part-time courses for the master’s than for the bachelor’s program, and the offer at universities is greater than at universities of applied sciences. Around 14 percent of all courses in Germany can also be completed part-time.
The Technical University (TU) Darmstadt offers 94 of the 113 courses as part-time, but only 670 of the 25,000 students use them – not even three percent. Why so few? “The legal regulations are not such that they favor part-time studies,” says Gabriele Pfeiffer, who advises students with children and part-time students at the TU.
The main drawback: “If you study part-time, you lose your student loan entitlement.” However: “Bafög funding is falling further and further anyway, and fewer and fewer students are entitled to it at all,” says Pfeiffer. “Conversely, of course, that means that more of them have to be gainfully employed because only a few students can be fully financed by their parents.”
Most of their university students study part-time because they are employed to a considerable extent on the side. Pfeiffer cannot say whether they want to or have to work. Childcare also plays a major role. In contrast to private universities, part-time studies at state universities must be applied for, often new every semester. And it is only approved for specific reasons: In addition to employment, these include bringing up children, a disability, a chronic serious illness, caring for relatives or high-performance sport.
Fewer events and more time before the exam
All of these reasons make it difficult, of course, to complete a full-time course that, according to Pfeiffer, is geared towards doing it 40 hours a week for four or six semesters. Those who study part-time, on the other hand, usually only attend half of the courses and have longer deadlines to achieve minimum performance or to write their thesis.
And a maximum of twice as long the standard period of study applies – exceeding this has different consequences depending on the federal state. Long-term tuition fees are threatened in Lower Saxony, Saxony or Thuringia, while nothing happens in federal states like Hesse.
The TU Darmstadt is recording a continuously increasing demand for its part-time offers – which has increased again since the beginning of the corona pandemic. Paradoxically, this has to do with the fact that many students can no longer be gainfully employed: “Corona has not only eliminated jobs in the catering trade, but also many student jobs in industry,” says Pfeiffer. Therefore, some students would only have the choice of dropping out of their studies because they can no longer finance it – or switching to part-time studies. The reason for this: unlike full-time students, part-time students are entitled to unemployment benefit II because they are still available for placement on the job market.
And that puts you deep in the bureaucratic turmoil surrounding part-time studies: If you come from abroad and study in Germany, you endanger your residence permit if you switch to part-time studies. The eligibility to live in a student dormitory can also be at risk.
If you only study halfway, you lose your insurance status
The aspects of insurance law in particular are complicated: full-time students and students who complete a part-time course with more than half the workload of a full-time course are allowed to work up to 20 hours a week and remain insured as students. In addition, they do not have to pay any contributions to unemployment insurance.
This is called the working student privilege. This does not apply if a part-time course is carried out with half or less of the workload of a full-time course. In such cases, the health insurance company assumes that the majority of the workforce is not devoted to studying, which is why these part-time students are considered and insured as normal employees.
TU Darmstadt, like many other universities, reacts to these niggles by offering two different part-time study plans: While full-time study usually earns 30 credit points per semester, the model with 20 credit points is considered to be “predominantly studying” and remains in the student health insurance.
Pfeiffer recommends the study plan with 15 credit points to students who have health insurance as employees, because it allows them to safeguard their social security rights in the event of unemployment and to apply for unemployment benefit II. “This is how we protect both sides,” explains Pfeiffer.
When the employee studies, the employer benefits
The student advisor immediately points out another problem with part-time studies at a state university: “We don’t have a separate range of courses for this, only an extended face-to-face study.” The students must therefore be flexible in terms of time. “And they need an accommodating employer who supports them, sometimes gives them time off in the middle of the day or even two weeks at a time, so that they can do a laboratory work, for example when they are studying chemistry.”
If you have an uncomfortable employer, there is the option of part-time study alongside your job. However, there are fees for this in many federal states – for example in Hesse, Baden-Württemberg or Bavaria. “The master’s can easily cost more than 20,000 euros,” says Gabriele Pfeiffer.
You can also study at private universities that specialize in part-time courses – as Antonia Hagedorn does. She pays about 350 euros a month in tuition fees. “The financial side was rather irrelevant to me, I really wanted to do my master’s degree, learn more, develop myself further,” she explains, explaining her decision to join the FOM University. In addition, your employer contributes to the costs – if you study that suits your field of work, the bread maker will benefit from it, says Hagedorn.
“If I had professional situations that I couldn’t solve myself, I would just ask my professor if the subject was being discussed anyway,” says the tax assistant. That was a great advantage for her, which her employer also benefited from indirectly. She also sees the small groups of ten or 15 participants as the advantage of part-time studies at a private university: “You don’t sit in the Audimax with a thousand other students.”
A tight workload: part-time studies plus work or family
Hagedorn recommends part-time study to anyone who already knows exactly what they want: “You commit yourself very strongly. If you discover in the middle of your studies that you don’t like this particular subject, you’ve invested a lot in vain. And you mostly work also in the field. ” Her full-time study of economics was much broader, which made it easier for her to find out what she liked and what didn’t.
The fact that she got stuck with tax law, of all things, has to do with the fact that many say: “Taxes, for God’s sake!” That was an incentive for them. Your course of study concludes with the “Master of Law” and at the same time prepares you for the tax advisor examination.
Before she tackles this learning-intensive exam, however, Hagedorn wants to take a break: “After completing my master’s degree, I would also like to have a little social life and freedom again.” When her friends partied at the weekend or went to the movies in recent years, she often sat in the library or at home to study. But she has not regretted it.
Gabriele Pfeiffer from the TU Darmstadt, however, acknowledges that part-time studies still have a lot of room for improvement: “Particularly with regard to equal opportunities and lifelong learning, it needs to be promoted more strongly.”