With the framework agreement V, which regulates the financing and development of the Thuringian universities until 2025, the TU Ilmenau receives a stable financing basis.
In September 2020 the state and Thuringia's universities had agreed on Framework Agreement V and, on this basis, signed Target and Performance Agreements (ZLV) with the respective individual targets and resulting measures in December. The President of TU Ilmenau, Professor Kai-Uwe Sattler, sees the associated financial resources of TU Ilmenau as positive:
'Framework Agreement V secures the university good, task-appropriate financial resources and an annual increase in funding until 2025. This gives us planning security for the next five years.
Thuringia-wide core topics and university-specific profiling
According to Thuringia's Science Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee, however, the good funding is also linked to expectations on the part of the state for Thuringia's universities. Overarching core topics for all universities are further digitization, ensuring high quality in research and teaching, strengthening teacher training and engineering in particular, and increased activities to raise the profile of research and participation in research funding programs and third-party projects. These have been laid down in the target and performance agreements for each university.
The goals of the TU Ilmenau
The TU Ilmenau pursues the goal of further strengthening and expanding its position as a strong research, technical university with an international orientation. To this end, TU Ilmenau has set three focal points for its work in the coming years. In the focus area "Innovative Research" the university intends to further intensify its research and transfer activities in the strategic profile lines and to acquire third-party funding projects, especially in the large formats of the Federal Government, the European Union and the German Research Foundation (DFG). Professor Sattler:
Having further developed the structural and organisational support measures for the acquisition of large formats in recent years, several proposals for Collaborative Research Centres and Research Training Groups of the DFG are now in preparation. We aim to have the first projects ready for application by 2022.
Another goal is the further development of an "International Campus". TU Ilmenau already has the most foreign students among Thuringia's universities. With the focus on the "International Campus", the TU Ilmenau wants, among other things, to increase the proportion of English-language teaching and continuing education concepts in the linguistic or intercultural area from the current 13 to 20 percent. The international visibility of the university is to be further increased. To this end, networking within Europe in particular is to be expanded in addition to the activities already underway.
The TU Ilmenau is continuing to drive forward the comprehensive digitalisation that has been initiated to support the core processes in research, teaching and administration under the focus "Digital University" with numerous measures in all areas.
The complete target and performance agreements between the Thuringian Ministry for Economy, Science and Digital Society and TU Ilmenau can be found here.
Annual budget increase
In return for these voluntary commitments by the universities, the Ministry of Science will provide the ten Thuringian universities with a total of 2.7 billion euros between 2021 and 2025. The funds will increase from a good 477 million euros in 2020 to around 580 million euros in 2025. A total of around 2.5 billion comprises the so-called "agreement budget", which is agreed with each university and then managed autonomously by the respective university. In addition, there is the central budget, with which the state provides supplementary funding for cross-university purposes such as central software licensing or federal programmes, as well as the strategy and innovation budget, which is used to support special university projects as needed.
90 percent basic budget
The agreement budget of TU Ilmenau amounts to about 72 million in 2021 and increases to 84 million euros in 2025. This agreement budget is divided into a basic budget (90 %) and a performance budget (10 %). The performance budget is tied to the achievement of certain agreed targets, mainly in the areas of "digitization", "innovative research" or "international campus". In addition, the state has set mandatory targets in terms of the proportion of permanently employed academic staff, third-party funds raised and the proportion of women in new professorships.
The TU Ilmenau receives further funds within the framework of the future contract "Strengthening studies and teaching", from the federal and state governments, the successor programme to the previous Higher Education Pact. The associated goals, obligations and measures of the university are fixed in a supplementary agreement to the goal and performance agreement.
Focus on engineering
One focus in Framework Agreement V is on strengthening the engineering sciences across Thuringia. To this end the TU Ilmenau, the Bauhaus University Weimar and five Thuringian universities with engineering subjects are working together in the "THÜRING. Alliance Thuringian Engineering Sciences". Within the framework of the alliance, which was founded in 2019, the participating universities are working on concepts for mutual use of research infrastructure, joint e-learning and engineering pedagogical continuing education courses, and the mutual exchange of young scientists, among other things. Non-university research institutions and partners from industry are also involved in the development of sustainable collaborations and strong research alliances.
On 23 June 2021, the Alliance invites to a "Day of Engineering Sciences" hosted by TU Ilmenau. Under the motto "Future - Innovation - Interdisciplinarity", the event is especially aimed at young scientists and is organized in close cooperation with the Graduate Center of TU Ilmenau.