50 years of the Austrian Study Grant Authority # 2022

The Austrian Study Grant Authority is an authority. Bureaucracy. How do you film bureaucracy?

People work in the Study Grant Office. People for people. Committed, experienced people devoted to help young people, who have set themselves a goal of completing their studies. So what could be better than talking to these people?

My film shows conversations with people who have applied for study grants, with people who process these applications and with people who influence the framework conditions for them. Interviews with a former recipient of study grants, who later helped to establish a student support as a section head and later as a Minister of Science, with a former head of the study grants authority, who was previously a recipient of study grants and now, as a judge at the administrative court, who decides on complaints against grant decisions, with a former student union official, who at that time introduced higher education scholarships and later became Minister of Science and Federal President. Above all, however, with many students whose studies would not take place without these grants, and with many employees of the study grants authority, who you can also watch at work.

Why do you need a study funding? This is answered by the education minister and the labor minister, but also by active and former chairmen of the Austrian Students' Union and a professor of philosophy who would not be teaching today without the existence of the study grants authority. Finally, the people who have steered the student grants authority through the past 50 years and, have their say together with many, many other employees, who made it what they are all rightly proud of today: an Austrian role model authority.