For many students, the corona pandemic has brought severe financial losses.

Anyone who normally makes their living as a waitress in cafes and restaurants, as a trade fair hostess or at the box office, had no income for months due to the lockdowns and other pandemic-related restrictions.

Quite a few moved back to their parents in order to at least keep the fixed costs low.

Tim Kanning

Editor in business.

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How big the financial gap really was for many students can be seen in the figures presented by the Center for Higher Education Development (CHE) on Wednesday.

According to the student loan test, the number of new student loans soared by more than 60 percent to 53,000 in the past year.

A total of 90,000 students in Germany are currently receiving money from a student loan or an education fund.

This corresponds to a share of almost 3 percent.

According to the authors of the study, the number of new loans jumped from 33,000 in 2019 to 53,000, back to the level of 2015.

Zero percent interest

State support for corona was the main reason for the increase. KfW, the federal and state development bank, relaxed the conditions for its student loans due to the pandemic last year and opened the program to foreign students for the first time. Interest on KfW student loans, which make up the lion's share of this market segment even after the pandemic, was reduced to zero percent by the end of this year. After 18,000 new deals in 2019, this number rose to 40,000 last year.

However, the CHE criticizes the fact that this increase was primarily due to the fact that foreign students could now also take advantage of state aid. Ulrich Müller, the head of political analysis at the CHE, believes that they would have missed their actual goal: “The KfW student loan should act as a state alternative to Corona emergency aid for everyone who is neither eligible for BAföG nor the - rather bureaucratic - Bridging aid can be recorded. Now we have to state that the KfW student loan has turned out to be a pseudo giant. ”The increase is mainly due to one-off effects. "That means: Even in the greatest crisis in post-war history, the KfW Student Loan was only able to convince new customers to a very manageable level among German students," said Müller.

KfW loan is one of the most expensive offers

The CHE expert attributes this to, among other things, the interest rates that KfW charges in normal times, i.e. probably again from 2022.

At 3.9 percent, KfW loans were among the most expensive in the study.

Other larger providers that are included in the test include the Federal Office of Administration with its educational loan, the Witten / Herdecke student association, Brain Capital and the opportunities eG.

Overall, the CHE classifies all of the offers examined as “consistently serious and well designed”.

The programs are usually structured in such a way that the borrowers receive a certain amount for their living expenses each month, from which the interest is already deducted. The repayment begins after a waiting period with the entry into professional life. In total, a good half a billion euros are paid out in this way, with an average of 528 euros per month for each student.