Oliver Tessenow feels upset. In his five years of undergraduate and graduate studies at Leibniz University Hanover, he has had to pay tuition, but as he prepares to leave next year with a master’s degree in education, the university plans to abolish the fees.

“We are annoyed that they haven’t been abolished already,” Mr. Tessenow said of the university’s charges, which began in 2006 and come to about €1,000 a year, or $1,300.

While fees are an increasingly heavy burden on students in places like England, Ireland, the United States and parts of Canada — and fee-paying campuses are proliferating around the world in emerging education markets — Germany is going the other way.

Introduced to inject additional financing into an overstretched public education system, tuition never caught on in a country where open education is seen as a key to social and economic progress.