GERMANY: Higher Education Sinks Low

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Nov 28 2006 (IPS) - German universities, pre-eminent in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities in the early part of the 20th century, no longer rank among the world’s most elite. The nation’s seats of higher learning find themselves buffeted by cost pressures and declining standards – but amid recent hopes of some revival.

Visitors to Berlin’s Humboldt University often pause to admire the portrait panorama of its 29 Nobel laureates on display on the upper marble landing of the main building.

Most of them belong to the period 1900-34 when German universities served as models of academic learning around the world, and spawned a shoal of Nobel Prize winners – Albert Einstein among them.

The absence of more recent portraits is blamed on the massive haemorrage of intellectual capital and talent from Germany during the Nazi era, and on the subsequent post-war division of the country.

“German universities are today in a state of decline due to chronic under-financing,” says Michael Burda, economics professor from the U.S. at Humboldt University in Berlin since 1993.

Burda told IPS this was evident from the low fraction of young Germans completing university degrees. “Only 22 percent of German students aged between 24-34 successfully finish their university studies – compared to over 28 percent in the Netherlands, 31 percent in Denmark and the UK, 39 percent in the U.S., 40 percent in Sweden and 51 percent in Canada.”

The 47-year-old Lousiana-born professor says that since 1991 the percentage of young people completing degrees has risen from 20 percent to over 28 percent in the wealthy countries.”In Germany it has hardly budged,” he says.

“These statistics reflect a qualitative development that should concern German politicians and policy-makers,” he said. “Berlin and Germany now seem very far from the golden age when Americans wrote scientific papers in German and dreamed of doing a doctorate here.”

In 2003 only 2,800 U.S. citizens were enrolled in German universities, while 9,000 Germans pursued studies in the U.S. – despite the fact that higher education in the United States costs “a substantial amount of money, unlike in Germany where students do not pay tuition fees,” Burda said.

So what’s gone wrong in the ‘Land der Dichter und Denker’ (the nation of poets and thinkers)?

One reason advanced is that Germany spends barely l.l percent of its gross domestic product on education, compared to 2.6 percent in the United States, 2.5 percent in Canada, 2.2 percent in Korea, 1.9 percent in Denmark, 1.8 percent in Finland and 1.7 percent in Norway.

Statistics compiled by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of 30 rich nations, show Germany dropping to 21st place on the education budget table – behind Turkey – in 2003, after occupying 14th place in 1995.

“University education is a service, no different from that provided by a law firm, medical practice or beauty salon. It costs money, a great deal of money, and German universities charge no tuition fees,” Burda said. “Far more money needs to be invested in it.”

Prof. Dieter Lenzen, president of Berlin’s Free University, agrees that more money has to be invested in higher education, but disputes Burda’s claim that German universities are still “in a state of decline.”

Lenzen told IPS this was true a decade ago as a result of the upheavals within Germany at the time of reunification. But now things are changing for the better, he said.

“We have done a lot of quality management work within German universities. It will take time, possibly a further ten years, but we are on the way,” he said.

Ever since the 1960s, more than 90 percent of university education has been publicly supported. Germany’s more famous universities – Heidelberg, Humboldt and the University of Munich – remain public institutions, largely financed by federal and regional governments.

Now there are signs that private funding is being introduced in Germany. In the past, private giving to universities was rare – due to the lack of a philanthropic tradition, and rules limiting tax-free donations. As a result German universities always lacked the resources of their U.S. counterparts.

More recently an ‘excellence initiative’ competition initiated by former German education minister Edelgard Bulmahn has been channeling hundreds of millions of euros into elite universities. The first round winners last month were the University of Munich, the Technical University of Munich and the University of Karlsruhe.

Last month, the International University of Bremen, a private university teaching engineering, sciences, humanities and social sciences to about 1,000 students, many of them foreign, announced it had received a 200 million euro donation from Klaus Jacobs, a billionaire German businessman. Delighted, the management promptly changed its name to Jacobs University.

“I hope this sets a precedent,” said Jacobs – not referring to the renaming. “There is a lot of wealth in private and corporate hands in Germany. It certainly would be desirable to see more of it going to institutions.”

Burda agrees. “Private sector involvement in university funding could come from rich individuals willing to donate part of their private wealth, from foundations and, in certain cases, from companies. Tuition fees could also play a role.”

Burda has raised eyebrows by suggesting that the city’s oldest seat of higher learning – the Humboldt University founded in 1812 – should be merged with the Free University created in 1948.

“Impoverished Berlin,” he said, can no longer afford two major universities on top of a complete engineering and technical school (The Technical University) and several specialised colleges.

Prof. Lenzen rejects the idea. “Today, the Free University is what we call an international network university – akin to a crossworld of cultures and nations in the midst of Europe. To merge it with the Humboldt would create a monster-size university with close on 100,000 students. It just wouldn’t make sense.”