Universities in Austria

Austria has one of the richest intellectual histories in Europe, so it is no surprise that its universities are excellent. Austria was the home of the world’s first psychologists, Freud and Jung, and it also produced Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the most important philosopher of the 20th century. It is also renowned as a destination for the study of the arts, especially music: Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert all lived and composed in Austria.

The university system itself, which begun in 1365 AD, is the oldest in Germanic Europe. From their earliest days, Austria’s universities, like those throughout Europe, were designed to cater to the sons (and, eventually, the daughters) of privileged families. Royalty, nobles, and other social elites dominated the halls of learning in Austria. All that started to change in the 1960s, when new attitudes were formed regarding the purpose of a university. People began to see institutions of higher learning as having a responsibility to the whole society, not just the elite. This is still the general attitude today, although socio-economic factors still make it harder for poor and middle-class families to send their children to college or university.

The Austrian college and university system has undergone massive changes in the last decade or two. One thing that has been a subject of controversy throughout Austrian society is the question of university fees. Up until 2001 education in Austria was free up to the equivalent of a Bachelor’s Degree. Starting in 2001, however, budget constraints forced the Austrian government to begin instituting fees. Although they are not nearly as expensive as tuition at public colleges in the United States, these fees are still seen as onerous for poor families, and many people see the fees as backsliding into the older view of the university education as a service that only the elite could benefit from. There are efforts being made today to do away with university fees provided that certain conditions are met. Soon, students who do well academically and complete their degrees within the prescribed 4-year period may have the fee requirements waived. Under the proposed system, students who do not do as well or who take longer than four years will have to pay for their studies.

The historically independent Austrian system of higher education is also undergoing changes as a result of the Bologna Process. This process, which has been designed by the authorities of the European Higher Education Area, is designed to integrate the universities of European countries so that their degrees, expectations, and academic requirements are more standardized. The goal is not to make all universities across Europe the same, but rather to ensure that an employer in Belgium can understand and evaluate the educational credentials of an applicant from Poland. In the increasingly open and interconnected job markets of Europe, this is seen as an essential setting of new trans-Continental regulations. In Austria, where degrees have historically been very different from the typical Bachelor’s-Master’s-Doctorate system that dominates in many other places, the Bologna process has necessitated major shifts in the way universities and colleges do their work.