Denmark pays students $1,000 monthly grant to go to universities, with ZERO tuition fee
However, the Denmark’s free education policy has created ‘eternity students’ who never graduate
Denmark has a term for people who don’t graduate in the normal five-year track: eternity students.
Because Danish students receive a $1000 monthly grant and pay no tuition, some feel compelled to move through their studies without thinking about the future.
A 2015 amendment made it easier for universities to push students through, but the trend still exists.
As one of a handful of countries that offers free tuition to college students, Denmark grants students enormous freedom from debt and the pressure to declare a major right away.
But some Danes, especially older citizens already in the labor force, say the extra freedom can eliminate a crucial sense of urgency for 20-somethings to become adults. The country now deals with “eternity students” — people who stick around at college for six years or more without any plans of graduating, solely because they don’t have any financial incentive to leave.
“With education being free, the Danish word ‘evighedsstuderende’ has risen,” Daniel Borup Jakobsen, a 24-year-old recent graduate and current vice president at the software company Plecto, told Business Insider. “It refers to a person who never finishes his studies but continuously keeps changing study program year after year.”
A 2015 amendment tries to motivate the eternity student
For years, Denmark has had a program that allots students a monthly grant of around $1,000 to cover living expenses. According to Jakobsen, the freedom enables people to float in a kind of listless state, only half-considering their options for the future.
The country has made some headway to counter eternity students. In 2015, the Danish government proposed and passed an amendment to the Study Progress Reform giving universities more power to hurry students toward graduation.
In Denmark, it’s typical to take five or six years for college and spend some of that time traveling.
Thousands of students protested the measure at the time, criticizing it as a way to remove their freedoms. Those in favor of the amendment claimed it would add more tax dollars to the economy — some $266 million, according to government estimates — and make the university system more efficient.