Germany pledges more for the best

On 12 October, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Scientific Council will announce which universities will receive a portion of €1.9 billion in additional funding over five years to improve research. Germany’s “Excellence Initiative,” as the programme is known, is a competition designed to catapult German universities back to the top echelons of science that they once occupied.

The contenders

Universities vying for top funding for their institutional strategies include: Technische Universität München, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Bayerische Julius-Maximilians- Universität Würzburg, Albert-Ludwigs- Universität Freiburg im Breisgau, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Universität Karlsruhe (Technische Hochschule), Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität München, Rheinisch- Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen and Freie Universität Berlin.

The programme was approved in July 2005 after Germany watched its university rankings fall year after year and continued to lose in the battle to attract the best students, professors and researchers. Approval for the programme faced many delays because it is funded by both the federal government (with 75 per cent) and the individual states (25 per cent), which are ultimately in charge of education.

In addition, Germany is in the thick of a separate process of reform called Federalism Reform in which it is overhauling the division of duties between the states and the federal government. When the funding finally became available, Peter Gaehtgens, then head of the German Rector’s Conference, said it was a positive step but that it came at the very last minute.

Scratching the surface

Not only was the measure a late response to rising competition from the United States and Asia, the Excellence Initiative only picks at the ice. It’s the first attempt to break the consensus that the quality of education and research is the same at each institution since universities are funded equally.

“This differentiation is a new idea – that not all university research is the same quality in all disciplines,” said Klaus Wehrberger, the head of the collaborative research division at the DFG.  

Wehrberger 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 have won additional funding and with it the title of an “elite” university. But Wehrberger says reform is only beginning: bigger budgets for universities and state-funded research must be secured over the long term.

Fear is the key

Oddly enough, it does not appear that business was behind this particular push to raise the quality of research. The German government was clearly motivated by fear of losing a leading position in industry because of a lack of investment in research, and it has said it aims to increase the competitiveness of German business on a global scale, but the initiative seems to have originated within the education establishment.

“The government wanted to raise investment in research to 3 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It is now 2.5 per cent. The DFG said, ‘What can we do?’” recalled Wehrberger. He added that it was the DFG that floated the idea to allow small divisions inside universities to compete for the funding.

Although business was not the impetus for Germany’s 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.

In March of this year, the European University Association, which represents European universities and national rectors' conferences, announced its vision and strategy for European universities. It criticised European companies and universities for having made “less than optimal use” of each other as potential partners.

“This is part of a general under-investment by Europe in knowledge creation and innovation…Universities will become more entrepreneurial, when and if they are given the freedom to do so…It is the dramatic difference between the US and our private funding investments which is actually most striking. Only Sweden attracts a similar amount of private funds into knowledge investment, primarily research, as the US does. In the EU as a whole, we fail to convince our firms and our citizens to invest in knowledge. It is a failure which is first and foremost a failure to ‘activate’, to open up higher education to private funding,” the association noted

The European Commission has already taken note of many of the criticisms voiced by the association. In a communication published in May this year, the Commission said the more than 4,000 educational institutions, 17 million students and 435,000 researchers in Europe were not being put to their best use, and it would cost Europe an average of €10,000 per student per year to close the funding gap with the United States. The ongoing Bologna process is standardising degrees across the continent to match the US’s bachelor and master degree system and make universities more student-friendly, but the reforms do not address deficits in research funding.

Here comes competition

Germany’s reform programme has unleashed healthy competition among the universities and forced them to consider their comparative strengths and weaknesses, something that may help efforts to raise additional funding via the private sector. Joerg Feuck, spokesman for the Technical University in Darmstadt, said the application process caused his school to solidify its corporate identity and its determination to work in a multidisciplinary way.

In January, a short list of winners for three categories of awards was announced. Some expected winners failed to make the list, and many of the winners are located in the southern part of Germany, indicating that politics did not play a heavy hand in the decisions. Each school’s application, which must be submitted in English, was reviewed by an international panel of experts. A separate second round of competition is going on to give those left out the first time another chance.

The programme seeks to fund about 40 graduate schools with an average of 1 million each per year and 30 so-called excellence clusters with about €6.5 million each per year. And, in the most generous category of funding, universities with a top-level research strategy will receive an average of €21 million annually. Winners in this category must be a winner 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.

Michael Schwarz, a spokesperson for Heidelberg University, said the application process demanded lots of creativity and created a high level of excitement around the university. If his school is chosen, it would mean an additional €130 million over five years.

“This means that we will be able to start future-oriented programmes that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to realise,” said Schwarz. However, even before any money has been handed out, he warned: “Programmes to continue or replace the Excellence Initiative will have to be established on a long-term basis. Research must be supported over and above the initiative, and, in a country like Germany, with few natural resources, research must have high priority.”