The snow started falling somewhere between Strasbourg and Karlsruhe – the kind of light, persistent flurry that makes a coach full of SU officers and staff go quiet and stare out the window like children.
By the time we pulled into KIT’s campus, the two shipping containers that house the AStA were dusted white. Yes – shipping containers.
The students’ union at one of Germany’s leading technical universities operates out of two metal boxes, and somehow this feels entirely appropriate for an institution that prides itself on engineering pragmatism over architectural pretension.
Inside the student social association next door, an honesty system for coffee operates via a jar on the counter. The space is cosy, a bit messy, and unmistakably student-run in the way that matters – nobody has tidied up for visitors, because nobody expected visitors to need tidying for.
There’s a sofa that’s seen better days and a noticeboard covered in flyers for events we’ve never heard of. It feels like walking into someone’s living room, which is pretty much the point.
This is Day 3 of the Wonkhe SUs Rhineland study tour – thirty-five student officers and SU staff from UK SUs are spending a week in Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.
We’re in Germany after two days in France, visiting KIT in Karlsruhe and Saarland University in Saarbrücken, before crossing into Luxembourg on Wednesday morning.
Agreement, not consultation
What we found at KIT changes how you think about academic representation. Baden-Württemberg’s Landeshochschulgesetz – the state higher education law – creates something called Studienkommissionen at faculty level.
These are study commissions, and their composition is specified in the legislation – up to ten members, of whom exactly four must be students. One of those students must also be a member of the faculty council. The chair is the Studiendekan – the study dean.
So far, so familiar. The UK has programme committees with student members too. But here’s the difference.
Under §25 of the LHG, faculty study and examination regulations, as well as programme changes and elective options, all require the Einvernehmen – the agreement – of the study commission. The faculty council cannot validly approve them without it.
This is significant power over curriculum architecture, handed to a committee that must include four students. When the study commission’s tasks include recommendations on curriculum development, recommendations on how teaching funds are spent, and participation in teaching evaluation and the internal quality assurance procedure, that means those reps have real weight behind them.
In England, OfS’s student engagement conditions require providers to ensure students can “effectively engage.” Effectively engage with what? Processes designed to produce the outcome the institution wanted anyway. German students in Baden-Württemberg can stop the process entirely.
Where students make things
Behind the AStA containers sits AKK – the Arbeitskreis Kultur und Kommunikation. We saw the Altes Stadion building, which houses a Kulturcafé that operates as a student meeting point during the day, with Schlonze (its pub) theme nights and live music in the evenings.
But AKK isn’t just a bar. It’s a working group of the verfasste Studierendenschaft – the constituted student body – run entirely by volunteers, governed within the AStA structure, with participation open without registration. And behind the café there’s infrastructure that UK SUs have largely never built.
There’s a photolab for black-and-white film development, complete with studio lighting and backdrops, accessible via deposit and induction. There’s a workshop with wood and metalworking tools, including the FLINTA*-Schrauben sessions that provide repair and skills-sharing specifically for women, non-binary and trans students. There’s an E-Labor with lab benches available by arrangement. There’s a 3D printer for small projects. And there’s equipment and stage-tech lending for Fachschaften (academic societies) and student groups putting on events.
This isn’t a “makerspace” in the UK sense – a bookable room with equipment and staff supervision. It’s owned and run by students. The distinction matters. It’s a Channel 4 commissioning model – enabling student-led cultural production rather than delivering programming to them.
The AStA itself runs a welfare footprint that is broad. There’s the Freitische system – €65 per month for Mensa meals for students in acute financial difficulty, application-based with income and expenditure evidence, typically time-limited to three months. There’s a Notlagenhilfe emergency fund with its own allocation commission elected by the student parliament. There’s a print shop with published per-page pricing. There’s a transport van rental.
And every September, there’s emergency accommodation for students arriving without housing – including non-KIT students who’ve come to Karlsruhe and found themselves with nowhere to live. The AStA provides somewhere to sleep while you sort yourself out.
A different relationship to work
The vegan salmon at Saarland University’s Mensa was surprisingly good – the kind of detail that matters when you’re trying to feed thirty-five people on a tight schedule in January snow.
We’d come to Saarbrücken partly to meet the international office about Transform4Europe – the European Universities alliance that Saarland leads. The alliance now includes eleven universities across Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, Italy, Lithuania, France, Slovenia, Ukraine and Germany, with €14.4 million in Erasmus+ funding between 2024 and 2027.
What Transform4Europe offers students is structured mobility embedded in curricula. “Mobility windows” are designated periods within a study programme for international experience – not the ad hoc “find something abroad that might transfer” approach, but pre-agreed points with mapped modules and clearer recognition. As the Vice-President for Internationalisation puts it:
We also aim to strengthen mobility between locations, both through virtual offerings and through mobility weeks and short-term stays. This is particularly attractive for students who don’t want to spend an entire semester or academic year abroad.
There’s also the Transform4Europe Tracks programme – additional qualifications of up to 24 ECTS that students can acquire alongside their regular degree, with mandatory physical or virtual international mobility built in.
But what struck us most at Saarland was the Students@Work programme run by the AStA. Germany’s employment framework for students is worth understanding, because it shapes everything.
A “Minijob” is marginal part-time employment with an earnings limit – €603 per month from January 2026. Stay within that limit and the job is treated as marginal for social insurance purposes. A “Midijob” is the band immediately above – €603 to €2,000 per month – where the employee’s social insurance contributions are reduced but the employer pays normal contributions.
The crucial point is that minijobbers have the same employment law rights as full employees. Statutory minimum wage, pro-rata annual leave, continued pay during illness for up to six weeks. The “mini” is about earnings thresholds and social insurance classification, not about employment protections. This is a government that has specifically thought about students needing to work and that has designed a system to maximise it.
Students@Work provides dedicated support covering minijobs, midijobs, Werkstudent arrangements, short-term employment, combining jobs, checking contracts, holiday entitlement, dismissal questions. There’s a partnership with the Campus Büro that holds information consultations in AStA rooms. And for cases needing legally trained input, there’s a Law Clinic with named contact and published consultation hours.
UK students work similar casualised jobs with less legal infrastructure, less understanding of their rights, and almost no dedicated advice provision.
Statutory welfare
The Studierendenwerk Saarland is established by the Saarland Student Services Act of June 2021 – the Studierendenwerksgesetz – as a public-law institution with a defined mandate for “the social, health, economic and cultural support and promotion of students.”
As we saw in Munich, the Studierendenwerk model separates student welfare from universities entirely and hands it to a dedicated public body operating at regional scale. What’s distinctive at Saarland is the dedicated legal regulation specifically for the Psychologisch-Psychotherapeutische Beratungsstelle – the psychological-psychotherapeutic counselling service. Mental health provision has its own statutory basis, not just institutional discretion.
The 2024 annual report tells the story of what happens even with that framework. Capacity was “voll ausgelastet” – fully utilised. The service counselled 833 people, down from 919 the previous year. The drop isn’t reduced demand – it’s staffing vacancies as the binding constraint.
Twenty-eight per cent of PPB student clients have international origins. English-language counselling is “very well received” because it’s otherwise difficult to access non-German psychological support outside the higher education context. The report describes 2024 as shaped by “multiple crises” and rising living costs pressures alongside consistently high demand.
Even with dedicated legal basis and regional scale, capacity constraints bite. But the framework exists – the data collection enables reporting on who’s being reached and who isn’t, and the statutory mandate creates accountability that institutional discretion doesn’t. It also means that its manager feels a lot more free than many we might in the UK to criticise the universities on her patch in terms of prevention and exacerbation of issues via the academic provision.
A university from scratch
Wednesday morning saw us cross into Luxembourg, the snow easing as we headed south. The Belval campus announces itself before you see the university – preserved blast furnaces and industrial heritage infrastructure rising from what was once Luxembourg’s largest steelworks site.
The transformation is deliberate and vast. Fonds Belval, a public body created by law in 2002, acts as the state’s developer for state facilities on the Belval-West industrial wasteland. The investment was around €1 billion. The spatial purpose is dual – create Luxembourg’s primary education and research pole in one place, and use that knowledge infrastructure as the anchor for regional economic transformation in the south.
The country that built its wealth on steel is now investing in human capital. The Maison du Savoir – House of Knowledge – houses the rectorate and central administration alongside teaching space and student services. It’s the kind of deliberate, planned, state-funded campus infrastructure that UK universities last built in the 1960s.
The University of Luxembourg itself was founded by law in 2003 – Luxembourg’s first and only public university, consolidating predecessor institutions into a single national platform. The 2018 law updating the framework explicitly “builds on” those 2003 foundations.
One country, one university, one national union. No mission group rivalries, no postcode lottery of services, no competition for the same students. When something needs fixing, there’s one conversation to have.
Everyone has to go abroad
And they’re mobile. Almost every bachelor student at the University of Luxembourg must complete a mobility semester at a foreign university in order to receive the degree.
The practical architecture exists to make it work – partner options, financial support, Erasmus+ mechanisms, learning agreements for credit recognition. For Life Sciences specifically, there’s an optional joint degree pathway with the University of Strasbourg requiring two mobility semesters. Mobility isn’t an extra – it’s where you earn a semester’s worth of credit via an approved learning agreement.
Imagine if UK universities required a semester abroad. The logistics would be tricky – we’ve built a system where mobility is a rare nice-to-have for students who can afford it and whose programmes happen to offer it, not embedded infrastructure for everyone. The Turing scheme didn’t come close to enabling this at scale – SUs will need to work on making Erasmus+ attractive between now and its restart in January 2027.
In the law
Luxembourg’s 2020 “loi sur les stages” – the placement law – filled what the legislative file called a “quasi-total legal vacuum.” Before 2020, student placements operated in a grey zone. Now there’s a framework.
The law distinguishes two types. A “stage obligatoire” is a placement that forms an integral part of a programme – including placements prescribed in a Bachelor or Master. A “stage pratique” is a voluntary practical internship aimed at gaining professional experience.
The core mechanism is a written internship agreement – usually tripartite for course-linked placements, involving the student, the host organisation, and the education provider. The convention must contain prescribed elements: activities assigned, start and end dates, maximum weekly presence, absence authorisation, the stipend where paid, a named tutor at the host, benefits in kind, social protection including accident insurance, and termination arrangements.
There’s an “educational purpose” constraint hard-coded into the law. The internship must be for information, orientation, and professional formation. It cannot be used to obtain labour equivalent to an employee, cover permanent roles, replace an absent worker, or absorb temporary workload peaks.
Payment thresholds depend on type and duration. For a stage obligatoire, there’s no mandatory indemnity if under four weeks, and a minimum of 30 per cent of the social minimum wage for four weeks or more. For a stage pratique, it’s 40 per cent for four to twelve weeks, and 75 per cent for more than twelve weeks. If you already have a Bachelor, the reference wage shifts to the qualified minimum wage.
UNEL – the Union Nationale des Étudiant-e-s du Luxembourg – opposed exemptions when the law was being debated in 2018. Education providers can prohibit remuneration in the convention and make compliance a condition of recognising the placement – in which case the host is exempt from paying. UNEL argued this pushed interns into precarity, demanded remuneration for both types of placement, and complained they weren’t included in the negotiations.
UK placement debates rumble on without any of this framework – no minimum payment thresholds, no statutory tutor requirement, and no register.
Credit for involvement
Meanwhile the Certificate in Student Engagement and Leadership is a University of Luxembourg add-on credential – 10 to 15 ECTS taken alongside your degree, built up over time through activities from a published catalogue.
The ECTS allocations reveal what’s valued. Career Centre workshops run at 0.10 to 0.20 ECTS each. Faculty student delegation membership is worth 10.00 ECTS. Study programme representative is 5.00 ECTS. Student association board roles run from 5.00 to 8.00 ECTS depending on office. Cultural participation through Espace Cultures is 2.00 to 3.00 ECTS.
These are treated as additional credits – not transferable to degree credits, not substituting for anything in the curriculum. But they appear. A student who spent three years as a faculty rep graduates with that recognised formally on a university certificate.
UK universities sometimes “embed” skills in the curriculum, and there’s a handful of “awards” for extra-curricular. Luxembourg issues credit – makes involvement visible in a way that matters.
Putting students at the centre
The Vice-Rectorate for Academic Affairs recently became the Vice-Rectorate for Academic and Student Affairs – a subtle but significant change. As the university puts it, the new title underlines “the role of students in the University’s education policy.”
The new Vice-Rector, Professor Philippe Hiligsmann, came from UCLouvain where he served as Vice-Rector for Student Affairs. His framing is instructive:
For me, being a professor means not only educating students academically but also supporting their growth outside the classroom.
He describes research at UCLouvain showing that more than 50 per cent of students felt a positive impact from extracurricular involvement on their social networks and sense of inclusion, contributing to mental wellbeing and persisting beyond their studies. The Certificate in Student Engagement and Leadership is the institutional response to that evidence.
The president of the student delegation sits on the Board of Governors as a voting member – not observer status, not advisory, but voting. Article 41 of the 2018 law confirms the mission of the Student Delegation in the governance structure and defines the basic modalities of its election.
None of this has stopped controversy. UNEL recently expressed “indignation” at the university’s decision to double tuition fees from €200 to €400 per semester starting September 2025 – a 100 per cent increase “imposed without a concrete and detailed justification.” The national union argues this “directly penalizes students and calls into question the accessibility of higher education in Luxembourg.”
Even in a system with strong formal student voice, the fights continue.
The infrastructure around it
SAUL – the Student Association for University Campus Life – manages the Student Lounges at Belval and Kirchberg. Free tea and coffee all day for any student. Events programming including cocktail nights and karaoke. Other associations running events in the lounges during semester.
The governance is integrated. SAUL manages availability and booking. The Office of Student Life handles authorisations and security liaison for late events. “Managed by students, for students” – but woven into university operations rather than isolated from them.
Elsewhere an Incubator and Entrepreneurship Programme offers a pathway from curiosity to investment readiness. There’s the My Big Idea competition in October with a €1,000 prize, requiring completion of workshops and Co-Founders Nights. Selected teams progress to a four-day Ideation Camp, then into incubation or the Venture Mentoring Service. The Accelerator is sector-agnostic and equity-free, including a USA immersion trip to San Francisco, North Carolina, New York and Boston.
For PhD students, there’s a 50-hour Introduction to Entrepreneurship course and an International Summer School. The Venture Mentoring Service has mentored over 100 entrepreneurs since 2018.
This isn’t careers-service-runs-some-workshops. It’s structured infrastructure with international ecosystem access and research council funding behind it.
What the law provides
Three cities, two days, and a thread running through all of it – what happens when student interests are codified rather than consulted on.
The study commission Einvernehmen requirement at KIT means curriculum regulations cannot pass without student agreement. The Saarland Studierendenwerk legal mandate creates a statutory duty for student welfare provision. Luxembourg’s placement law sets minimum payment thresholds and tutor requirements that didn’t exist before 2020. The Certificate in Student Engagement and Leadership gives formal credit for involvement.
These aren’t aspirational policy statements – they’re binding frameworks.
UK student voice mechanisms are advisory. Students can be consulted, ignored, and thanked for their input, and OfS can require “effective engagement” without specifying what that means or giving students any power to enforce it. What would change if any of this were actually in the law?
We’re heading to Belgium now – Liège this evening, then Ghent, then Rotterdam. The snow has stopped. À bientôt.
