Germany names research "Ivy League"

One of three elite winners: the TU München.

"This is an important day for science in Germany," Annette Schavan, the federal minister of education, said when the announcement was made.

Concentrated in the southern part of the country, the winners among dozens of applicants and a short list of ten were the Technical University in Munich, Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and the University of Karlsruhe (Technische Hochschule).

Surprise finish

Germany's Research Foundation (DFG) and the Scientific Council, which are overseeing the selection process, never specified how many universities would be awarded the top level of funding, and the public reacted with surprise when only three universities were chosen last week in the first round of awards. But the decision underlines the message behind the Excellence Initiative programme: it pays to be the best at what you do.

Had judges picked a large number of winners and watered down the awards that will total €1.9 billion over five years, the message would not have been so strong.

The three winners will receive an average of €21 million in additional funding as well as prestige that can be used to attract donations, private funding and fee-paying students. Germany's highest court ruled last year that the federal ban on tuition fees was unconstitutional since states have the ultimate say on education. This paved the way for universities to increase their budgets with fees. Universities in Lower Saxony and North Rhine Westphalia will be the first to do so.

Although only three schools won top-tier funding, the Excellence Initiative has set off a wave of reform at universities across the country by putting them head to head with one another and forcing schools to create long-term strategies on how to differentiate themselves. Joerg Fueck at Technical University in Darmstadt said the application was an exercise in branding. His school was left out completely in the first round but has hopes for the second.

A German Ivy League

The Excellence Initiative is being funded by the federal government (with 75 per cent) and the state government (with 25 per cent) after a push from the education establishment. It was designed to catapult Germany's universities into the international "Ivy League" and respond to competition from the United States and Asia for the best students, faculty and researchers. It is also meant to keep Germany from losing its economic standing.

Klaus Wehrberger, the head of the collaborative research division at the DFG, says one result of the reform will be that both students and researchers will be able to orient themselves within the university system much quicker and much easier by knowing which schools are "elite." But Wehrberger warns that reform is only beginning: bigger budgets for universities and state-funded research must be secured over the long term.

Indeed the additional funding is a good start but does little to put German university budgets on par with American counterparts. Harvard University, for instance, had an endowment of $29 billion for the fiscal year 2006 and its budget for fiscal 2005 was $2.8 billion.

Although business was not the impetus for current reforms, German educational reformers have acknowledged the role of industry in improving research; to this end, each application for additional funding was judged partly on its plans to work together with the private sector. Besides the three winners of top-tier funding, 18 graduate schools and 17 so-called "excellence clusters" won additional funding. The winners were chosen from 88 applicants.

Consolation prizes

A separate second round of competition is going on to give those left out of the first round of funding another chance. In total, the Excellence Initiative will fund roughly 40 graduate schools with an average of €1 million each per year and 30 excellence clusters with about €6.5 million each per year as well as the funding set aside for top-tier winners, which must be winners in the two other categories as well. The Excellence Initiative will also provide an allowance of 20 per cent of total funding to cover indirect programme costs.

The three winning schools are in southern Germany, indicating that the influence of the various states was kept out of the decision-making process.

"In our meeting today, we reached a consensus that the only criteria for additional funding was excellence and that regional politics should not play a role," said Schavan.

Some left out of top-level funding reacted with disappointment, and the governor of the eastern state of Thuringia warned that the east may continue to lag behind the western portion of the country if officials don't account for uneven starting points.

'Not fair'

Universities in the east are not yet playing "in the same concert" as those in the west, Dieter Althaus told the German media.

In northern Germany, which left the process with few awards, the disappointment had a sting to it. The science minister of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, Dietrich Austermann, accused the DFG of changing the rules shortly before the final decisions were made thus eliminating the influence of state science ministers.

In southern Germany, politicians and universities welcomed the decision. Edmund Stoiber, the governor of Bavaria, said the award to two schools in his state was very good news and proved that Bavaria was top of its class. And the rector of Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Bernd Huber, told reporters that the results were the best he could imagine.

"With this we have a chance of making it to the top," he said. The head of the Technical University in Munich said the decision confirmed that his school's transformation from a bureaucratic organization to an entrepreneurial university has paid off.

Seen as a good first start, few people in the scientific and business communities believe the Excellence Initiative will be enough to raise the quality of German research over the long term. Their urge for further funding has not fallen on deaf ears.

Schavan says: "I'm convinced that we should do all we can to continue the Excellence Initiative after 2011. I will do my best to make this happen."