She has a guilty conscience when she needs a new piece of clothing. It buys only in cheap stores like New Yorker and Orsay, preferably in the sales. And she often eats with her boyfriend so she does not have to spend that much money on food. Luxury is for her to have her hair cut at the barber's.

Andrea Siebert receives 550 Euro Bafög a month. But that's hardly enough for the student to live. She pays 310 euros for her room in the dormitory in Konstanz alone. "The Bafög can not really tackle social reality," says the 23-year-old, who studies economics and sociology.

student loans

What is Bafög?

Bafög is the abbreviation for Federal Training Promotion Act. The grant, which was introduced in 1971, aims to enable young people to complete training irrespective of their social and economic situation.

Who gets Bafög?

In principle, young people with German citizenship as well as foreigners who have a perspective of staying in Germany and are socially integrated are supported. Trainees can usually only be promoted if they start the education they are seeking for support before reaching the age of 30, or for Master's programs before the age of 35.

How many students receive the Bafög maximum rate?

In 2017, around 229,000 were fully funded by around 557,000 students who received Bafög. The level of education depends on various factors, for example, whether the students still live with their parents or in a shared flat, whether they study abroad or in Germany, how many siblings they have and how high their own wealth is. At present, the maximum rate for students who do not live with their parents is 735 euros.

How do you pay back the student loan?

Bafög recipients do not have to repay the entire grant, but only a part, since Bafög is paid half as a loan and half as a grant. For the repayment, they usually have 20 years time. You can pay for it in one go or in installments. Who pays it at once, gets a part. With the repayment they have to start five years after the end of the Bafög funding period. A maximum of 10,000 euros must be repaid.

The Bafög is intended to help young people to make a living and thus complete their education at schools and colleges. Although there should be a reform of the promotion this year: The Bafög rates, the housing allowance and the allowances are raised from the winter semester for the first time in three years, but there were no adjustments from 2010 to 2016. The green education expert Kai Gehring recently accused the Union and SPD of having pushed the student loan through numerous rounds of null and idleness in an all-time low.

Since 2012, fewer and fewer students are getting Bafög. At that time, 18 percent had received funding, according to the Federal Statistics Office in 2017, only 12 percent. The students do not apply for the money because they believe they are not entitled to the parents' over-earning or fear of getting into debt.

The Bafög reform is now to take away this fear from students, because those who can not repay Bafög's loan share within 20 years should be forgiven the remaining debt.

Oliver Kaczmarek, spokesman for education and research of the SPD parliamentary group, told the SPIEGEL that the changes to Bafög went in the right direction. However, he also knows that the student loan is not enough students to finance their lives.

"With the forthcoming amendment, we are again orienting student loans to the cost of living for students, and it needs to be adapted on a regular basis," says Kaczmarek.

How can the Bafög become fairer?

University expert Christiane Konegen-Grenier from the Institute of German Business in Cologne also thinks it makes sense to link the Bafögs funding rates to the cost of living. For this, students would not have to be individually queried, one could simply orient themselves to the cost of living calculated by the Federal Statistical Office.

Konegen-Grenier proposes three concrete measures to make the Bafög fairer.

  • First, the maximum share that you have to pay back - so far it is 10,000 euros - must be based on how long someone is studying. The capping limits would have to be different, depending on whether you are doing a Bachelor or a Master.
  • Second, each student would have to receive the child benefit directly.
  • And thirdly, there should be a federal student loan, a loan made up of the KfW loan and education loan from the Ministry of Education, which subsidizes government interest.

But at Bafög there is another big problem that will not be solved by the reform. The applications are too complicated. If more students are to be supported, there must also be more counseling opportunities, says Oliver Kaczmarek. In addition, "we are very dissatisfied with the implementation of the electronic application". So far, the application can hardly or only very cumbersome online made.

Everyone knows Bafög, only a few apply

Andrea Siebert from Konstanz says it took her a week to complete the first application. There are many attachments and sometimes they have had to look in the law for what was meant.

Bastian Krautwald wants to change that. The 22-year-old has phoned 172 Bafög offices and found that many offices interpret principles differently and also make different demands. Uniform do not run that.

Krautwald and his team have also asked various Berlin universities and asked students how they are financing their studies. All knew Bafög, but only a few had requested it. It was very difficult for those who did that.

Krautwald has founded the start-up deinestudienfinanzierung.de with two partners. Students can fill in a questionnaire online, find out in real time which funding options they are entitled to, and then submit the individual applications digitally. Krautwald promises that it only costs 30 minutes. If the application is successful, the students pay a fee of around 30 euros.

"Of ten applications, I can only edit one"

Dieter Königsmann sits on the other side of the desk. He works at the Bafögamt of the University of Göttingen and advises students: "The vast majority of the submitted applications is incomplete," he says. Konigsmann also finds that the forms for outsiders are often confusing and therefore advises to take advantage of the office hours of the Office.

But students also make other bad mistakes over and over again: They make false statements about their assets. "Here, in the past, there have often been subsequent examinations, so that not inconsiderable recoveries have arisen," says Königsmann.

Applicants often have difficulties with their parents as well. There are not a few cases in which relationships are broken and the office has to contact the parents. "It can also happen here that the parent in question is threatened with a periodic penalty payment if they do not cooperate."

Andrea Siebert from Konstanz has other problems. She can only stay afloat because she works alongside her studies. As an assistant scientist, she earns 200 euros a month at the university.

Her parents, a truck driver and a waitress in the casino, can hardly support her. From their joint income of around 2100 euros net per month, there is hardly anything left. "They even had to take out a loan so I could do Abi," says Siebert.