Chris Liebold
© TU Ilmenau/Michael ReichelThe Technische Universität Ilmenau will start a research project on May 1, 2021, in which it will examine the various competitive situations that universities in Germany face. Not only scientists compete for research projects and funds, but also the universities themselves are increasingly competing for scientists and students. The TU Ilmenau and the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena are now conducting three years of research into exactly how this dynamic competition between universities works and what influence the various players have in the process. The research project is part of the new research group "Multiple Competition in the Higher Education System: Actors' Constitution, Coordination of Actions and Consequences", which is funded by the German Research Foundation with 520,000 euros for three years.
For a long time now, the German higher education system has not only been about the scientific success of the individual researcher; in mutual competition, each university as a whole must position itself better and stronger. Colleges and universities in Germany are facing ever-increasing economic competition. They have to fight against each other for the resources of third-party funding, researchers, transfer projects and students. Competition is therefore multiple: each individual takes part in several different competitions and the competitions take place at different levels: among universities on the one hand and among researchers on the other, but also at the level of higher education policy and at the level of state and federal policy.
TU Ilmenau/Foto RichterProf. Thomas Grebel, Head of the Economic Policy Group at TU Ilmenau, and Prof. Uwe Cantner, Head of the Economics Group at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, are jointly developing a model that describes multiple competition in the higher education system. They then test it empirically, i.e. on the basis of empirical data. In doing so, they also ask themselves what consequences newly introduced competitions have on the universities and the players, such as the federal government's Excellence Initiative, in which only the supposedly best universities receive large amounts of funding, or the Higher Education Pact 2020, an administrative agreement between the federal and state governments on the distribution of first-year students among the universities. In such formats, do small universities lose and large ones win? Who can feel like the winner anyway: the university with the most funding or the university with the most students? Does specialization occur? What role does higher education policy play in thisof the federal states and the federal government?
The German Research Foundation is funding the research of the economists from Ilmenau and Jena with 520,000 euros for three years, of which 231,000 will go to Ilmenau. Within the research group, the scientists Thomas Grebel and Uwe Cantner will exchange ideas with colleagues from economics, business administration and sociology in order to evaluate the results of the sub-projects across disciplines. While the current research project focuses on the German higher education system, the two scientists would like to expand their research within the framework of the entire DFG Research Unit to include the positioning of German universities in international competition.
Contact:
Prof. Thomas Grebel
Head of Economic Policy Group
+49 3677 69-4032
thomas.grebel@tu-ilmenau.de