The TU Ilmenau will receive additional funding as part of the new future contract between the federal and state governments "Strengthening study and teaching". The future contract regulates the participation of the federal government in the financing of study places and quality measures in study and teaching in the years 2021 to 2027.
The implementation of the future contract takes place within the framework of country-specific declarations of commitment. Thuringia's declaration of commitment to the future contract provides in particular for measures to maintain existing training capacities and to increase the proportion of permanent teaching staff at higher education institutions, as well as to improve teaching quality. Other funding objectives include digitisation in teaching and learning and a focus on the subject groups of engineering, teacher training and health sciences.
The Goals of the TU Ilmenau
In a supplementary agreement to the target and performance agreement, the TU Ilmenau has fixed its targets for the four focal points of the future contract. As a target value for priority 1 "Maintaining training capacities and increasing the proportion of permanently employed scientific and artistic staff", the enrolment of 1,200 students in the 1st semester was agreed for 2025, the same size as in the previous Higher Education Pact. The university also aims to increase the proportion of female professors from the current 8.4 per cent in 2018 to 10 per cent and the proportion of permanent academic staff from just under 61 per cent to 63 per cent.
Increasing the quality of teaching
In Priority 2 "Improving the quality of teaching", the university aims to further improve the study conditions, to further strengthen the attractiveness of engineering subjects in particular and thus to contribute to securing the current and future demand for specialists. Concrete measures include the continuation of teaching groups for the coordinated supervision of basic subjects and the promotion of content-related coordination on teaching quality. Digital learning platforms such as Moodle will be further developed and the technical infrastructure of the lecture halls and seminar rooms will be expanded in order to adapt them to changed forms of teaching and learning. The Student Research Centre will be consolidated and further developed in order to educate the next generation and provide individual orientation for students studying STEM subjects. The good supervision ratio between teachers and students is to be maintained, as is the proportion of foreign students, which is to be increased slightly from the current 26 percent to the value of 26.5 percent.
Grants in the millions
To maintain training capacities and increase the proportion of permanently employed academic staff, the university will receive around 3 million euros per year from 2021 to initially 2025. During this period, the university will receive around 1.1 million euros per year for measures to increase the quality of teaching. 20 percent of these funds are earmarked for the university's own marketing measures. The university will receive further federal funding for digitisation measures in the area of teaching and learning and for the implementation of priority areas in certain subject groups if applications are approved within the framework of Priorities 3 and 4.
Future contract replaces university pact
Under the future contract "Strengthening Study and Teaching", the Federal Government will provide €1.88 billion per year from 2021 to 2023 and €2.05 billion per year on a permanent basis from 2024. The countries will provide additional funding in the same amount, so that the future contract will provide a joint investment of around 3.8 billion euros per year until 2023 and a total of 4.1 billion euros per year from 2024 onwards to support study and teaching. Thuringia will receive a good 40 million euros in federal funding for its universities each year during this period - a total of just under 300 million euros. The future contract replaces the previous university pact, through which Thuringia's universities had received an average of around 29 million euros in federal funding per year since 2007.