Semester Fee

The re-registration phase for the winter semester begins again from 15.07. Until August 15th you have the possibility to pay the semester fee at the university. The semester fee is 12 € higher than in the previous year and is now 200,40 €.
The reason for this is that the Studierendenwerk has increased its fee by 7 € and stuvus its fee by 5 €. We would now like to tell you more about our contribution increase.

The decision to increase the fee from 5€ to 10€ was not an easy one for the student parliament. All efforts in recent years to organize further projects and to actively involve more student groups have led to stuvus’ continuous growth.
Since stuvus has never increased its contribution in the past and the last semesters were already in deficit, an increase was now necessary.

Historically, stuvus started with a contribution of 9€. This quickly turned out to be too high, as the expenses were significantly lower than the income and the reserves were not to become larger than the expected expenses of a financial year. For this reason it was decided to reduce the contribution to 7€. But even with this contribution, reserves continued to be built up, so that it was finally reduced to the level of 5€. This contribution was to remain at that level for more than four years. Although the annual budgets have provided for a six-figure withdrawal from reserves every year since the reduction to 5€, the result in the annual accounts was always different. Only last year did the situation actually arise where expenditure exceeded income and reserves were reduced. When the new budget for the 2020/21 financial year was to be drawn up in January, the time had also come when the first considerations arose to increase the contribution. Due to administrative processes, a change in the contribution rules would not take effect until a few months later, which is why a contribution of 5€ had to be planned for the summer semester. All efforts in recent years to organize further projects, to offer students even more value for money and to actively involve more student groups have led to stuvus’ continuous growth. In the end, this also resulted in continuously increasing expenses, which is why the reserves should also correspond to this level. For this reason, a fee of 10€ was finally set at the 65th session of the student parliament (click here for the protocol). This fee is calculated in such a way that the fiscal year 2020/21 with a fee of 5€ (summer semester 2020) and 10€ (winter semester 2020/21) will probably also be in deficit, but there is sufficient security for the following years. The premise was that the new contribution of 10€ would also remain current over a long period of time. Further increases in the coming semesters are therefore not expected.

A general growth of stuvus has already been mentioned as a reason. In detail, this means that there are more student groups that actively support their students, more working groups that work on projects that are intended to offer added value to students on campus, and more departments that represent the interests of students vis-à-vis the university and other institutions. In the meantime, more volunteers are also active at stuvus. The practical result of all this is that there are more financial applications and thus higher expenses – and an increased administrative burden. In the end, we are happy to see that more and more students are benefiting from the projects that have been created through stuvus’ fee- both indirectly and directly. Projects that are paid for by stuvus and which we want to make available to students free of charge include, for example, regional cycling stations on the two campuses, which students can use free of charge, study calendars, which are also distributed free of charge, first semester introductions, which stuvus supports and thus makes possible in part, and much more. However, events such as CampusBeach, the freshmen’s party UNO and other major events will continue to be planned to cover costs – with income continuing to balance out expenses.

The only thing we can no longer claim for ourselves now is the long-standing title of student representation with the lowest contribution in the whole of Baden-Württemberg. In return, we will continue our efforts to develop into the student representation that best supports students.