In Denmark, you get paid for attending school, whether it is College or University, when you turn 18, you have the right to get a certain amount of money from the government in order to pay for different set of things that are required to attend school.
There are two types of benefits you can get from this.
One being the normal amount of money you get from living with your parents and the other being the amount of money you get for actually moving out.
Now, both of these sounds fair enough since it is no “small” amount that you’re given.
It ranges from around 900,- DDK to 5.941,- DDK as of 2016.
All of this sounds amazing at first and will most defintely get any student out of the house to get that extra benefit from the government.
Well this is where it gets a bit messy.
Denmark is primarily parted up in 3 region.
Jylland, Fyn and Sjælland.
For the sake of this argument, I am going to leave Jylland and Fyn out of the spectrum since there aren’t that many possibilities in those regions when it comes to universities and what not.
So, on Sjælland, there is this city called Copenhagen, you’ve might heard of it since it is the capital of Denmark and it holds some of the more “prestigious” universities such as IT University, Copenhagen Business School, The University of Copenhagen and what not.
That is all good and stuff, for now.
Here comes the big problem.
WHEN you move out as a student, you get the chance to get paid around 5900,- DDK for attending school. That is roughly around $1000 dollars.
But you are only allowed to earn around 4000,-DDK per month (~$700) which means that the tax people takes 39% of your income, YOUR ONLY INCOME.
And to make matters worse, the people who rent out apartments knows that the students do not have a lot of money on hand, so they just max out the rent on their apartments which means that it is barely possible to survive with the small amount of money you have on hand.
Now, if you are like me and you think “Oh, I’ll just move a bit further away so I don’t have to pay as much in rent” WELL THAT IS WHERE YOU ARE WRONG!
Since Copenhagen is located on Sjælland, the WHOLE FREAKING REGION has insane high rent, so you are either forced to move in with someone in a 1 room apartment that barely fits 1 person.
The rent for an apartment that is around 40 square metres costs around freaking 6000,- DDK, or around $1100 DOLLARS.
But this is just the simplified version....
There are many other things such as tax, transportation to school, food, personal expenses such as cellphones, internet, monthly subscriptions and many more.
As a college student, you literally do not have time for a part time job without stressing yourself out to the point of suicide.
I am not even joking.
The amount of stress that follows with this is not something I would wish upon my worst enemy.
It all might just seem like I am bitching and moaning, but trust me, when you have school from 8am to 4pm every day and it takes one hour to get to school and then one hour back to get home, you will start to feel sleep deprived since you have to both, cook, clean, do your homework, apply for different meetings at universities, while stille keeping up with social activities that is crucial to your group work in class.
Oh, and do not even get me started on how one educations have 200 more freaking school hours than the others in college. PLUS YOU CAN’T DO JACKSHIT WITH THAT EDUCATION BECAUSE NO ONE ACCEPTS THE SUBJECTS YOU STUDIED SO FUCK ME