The Week in Germany: Culture

November 3, 2006

Germany Chooses Munich, Karlsruhe as Elite Universities

Germany now has its first "elites" - universities, that is. In a nation that has long eschewed competitive rankings of colleges that are commonplace in the United States, the dawn of a new era seeking to foster excellence in higher learning has begun.

Too elitist?

A panel of experts on a federal government committee has determined that Germany's three best, most promising universities - a sort of Teutonic Ivy League, as The New York Times has put it - are all located in the country's south. German Research and Education Minister Annette Schavan announced on October 13 that Munich's Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich's Technical University (TU) and the University of Karlsruhe had been named Germany's first "elite universities".

The three institutions are the biggest winners in Germany's "excellence initiative", which was established to improve the country's chronically under-funded colleges - and its reputation abroad - by encouraging high level research and competition. The trio will receive around 120 million euros ($150 million) each in federal and state funds over the next five years.

Reaching for the sky through targeted funding efforts

"So far, no German university has made it into the top 50 worldwide, but if we carry out our concept for the future, after five years we could be among the first 25," TU President Wolfgang A. Herrmann told Handelsblatt online as reported by Deutsche Welle.

In total, the government has earmarked 1.9 billion euros for the initiative between 2007 and 2011, for which 22 projects at universities were singled out. The money will be distributed in three areas: for graduate schools that showed they knew how to promote new talent; for "research clusters" that demonstrated they were centers of excellence in particular fields; and finally for three top institutions that encompassed all of the previous qualities as well as presenting dazzling visions of a future of educational excellence.

Bavaria, of which Munich is the capital, and Baden-Württemberg, where Karlsruhe is located, cleaned up in the competition, with eight of the 18 successful graduate schools and another eight of the 17 recognized research clusters, which are intended to be developed into a small number of internationally recognized research institutes.

Karlsruhe in the running to create a German M.I.T.

At Karlsruhe, the extra money will help finance the university's highly regarded research in nanotechnology, the field of manipulating matter in dimensions as small as atoms or single molecules.

The school, which was founded in 1825 and is the nation's oldest technical university, moreover wants to merge with the nearby Karlsruhe Research Center, a 50-year-old institution that specializes in particle physics and nuclear fusion, to create the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

"We chose the name on purpose because K is not far from M in the alphabet," Horst Hippler, a professor of physical chemistry and the rector of the university, who wears a lapel pin with the letter K.I.T, said as reported recently by The New York Times.

Yet turning Karlsruhe into a German Massachusetts Institute of Technology will take decades, given the vastly higher levels of private and public research financing M.I.T. receives. The money flowing to Karlsruhe is "peanuts compared to Harvard, Stanford or Berkley," Hippler told the Times. Still, status counts, and will help Karlsruhe attract better faculty and students, he added. "Branding is very important. In five years, German university brands will be recognized around the world," he predicted.

Rankings stir controversy even as consensus on need for reforms gains momentum

All together, 27 universtities entered the competition, which was launched by then-Education Minister Edelgard Bulmahn in 2004. The idea of promoting "elite" institutions has sparked fears of a two-speed system of higher education in a country proud of its postwar tradition of egalitarianism, but most Germans agree that something needs to be done to remedy complaints of overcrowded lecture halls and shrinking budgets at the country's universities.

Universities in northern and eastern Germany went largely unacknowledged in the expert panel's decisions, causing some to predict they could end up as even bigger losers in the future as ever more funding goes to institutions in the south and west, already among the country's wealthiest regions, Deutsche Welle reported.

Every German university will at the very least have a chance to enter a second round of competitions starting in January, with winners due to be announced in October 2007.

End of a "utopian" era in higher education

The German ideal that all universities are basically equal dates back to the 1960's, when university admissions were opened up. This well-intentioned notion has however served to mask disparities in quality among the country's 102 universities.

Today Germany, like other European countries, is adopting separate bachelor's and master's degrees. Starting next year, German universities will moreover be allowed to charge tuition of 500 euros, or $630, per semester. Reflecting a growing trend of not admitting students en masse anymore, Karlsruhe for instance has begun to practice selective admissions for its smaller humanities programs.

Authority is moreover also being shifted away from powerful faculty senates to university presidents and their boards. Peter Frankenberg, the minister who oversees universities in Baden-Württemberg, told the Times: "We're moving from a republic of professors to an entrepreneurial university."

Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was a member of the selection committee said: "Germany was never a flat landscape. There were always hills and valleys. Our hope is that some of these hills will now grow into well-defined mountains."

Links:

The Initiative for Excellence (Federal Ministry of Education and Research)

Kultusministerkonferenz