The Relevance of the German Excellence Initiative for Inequality in University Funding

Mergele, Lukas; Winkelmayer, Felix

doi:10.1057/s41307-021-00233-1

Cited by 13 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…In financial terms, the "initiative" has not increased inequality between funded and non-funded universities so far. There has been an overall upward shift to a higher funding level for all universities [16] because those without "initiative" funding managed to find other (mostly public) sponsors [8]. These results are in line with our descriptive finding that Germany's public university system was stable between 1995 and 2018 (Section 4.1).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…Even more interesting are results that contradicted earlier warnings about increased concentration of grant funding due to the “initiative”. While both critics and DFG’s leadership envisaged an increased functional differentiation between research universities and teaching colleges [4, 41], such effects have not taken place: Universities with no excellence-funding managed to obtain funding from other sources than the DFG (most notably ministries, and thus other public moneys), thereby both buffering the “initiative’s” effect for individual universities and increasing the level of grant funding in the university system as a whole [8, 16].…”

Section: Literature Review and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Field size as a predictor of "excellence." The selection of subject fields in Germany's Excellence Initiative.

Heinze,

Habicht,

Eberhardt

et al. 2024

Preprint

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We investigate the selection of subject fields in Germany's "excellence initiative," a two-phase funding scheme administered by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2005 to 2017 to increase international competitiveness of scientific research at German universities. While most empirical studies have examined the "excellence initiative's" effects at the university level ("elite universities"), we focus on subject fields within universities. Based on both descriptive and logistic regression analyses, we find that the "excellence initiative" reveals a stable social order of public universities based on organizational size, that field selection is biased toward those fields with many professors and considerable grant funding, and that funding success in the second phase largely follows decisions from the first phase. We discuss these results and suggest avenues for future research.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Literature Review and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Field size as a predictor of "excellence." The selection of subject fields in Germany's Excellence Initiative.

Heinze,

Habicht,

Eberhardt

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In contrast, Lehmann and Stockinger (2018) find a positive effect on the amount of private funding per professor. Finally, Mergele and Winkelmayer (2021) show descriptively that University Strategy funding raises the total third-party funding of winning universities. However, this surge corresponds to a one-off level shift and not a dynamic process resulting in the increasing divergence concerning third-party funding of winning and not-winning universities.…”

Section: Excellence Initiative Effects On Academiamentioning

confidence: 94%

Heterogeneous Regional University Funding and Firm Innovation: An Empirical Analysis of the German Excellence Initiative

Krieger

2023

SSRN Journal

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“…For example, since 2005 the law on the so-called W-remuneration (Professorenbesoldungsreformgesetz) (Klenke, 2012; Annex 1) enables agreements between HEIs and academics on goals -similar to private corporations (Vormbusch, 2012). Another example for the German reward for compliance scheme is the so-called Excellence Initiative (IECEEI, 2016;Mergele & Winkelmayer, 2021;Schubert et al, 2017).…”

Section: A Literature-based Description Of Vop In Germanymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following the German tradition of rewards for compliance, the Excellence Initiative in particular actively constructs an environment based on the natural science research model and publication paradigm by rewarding universities according to publication outputs, third-party funding input, and large research clusters (DFG, 2013;IECEEI, 2016;Mergele & Winkelmayer, 2021). Although, for example, Gerhards (2014) claims that German higher education and science governance are overly fixated on third-party funding, Schubert et al (2017), for example, show that the so-called Excellence Initiative has had some impact on academics' publication behavior across all disciplines.…”

Section: A Literature-based Description Of Vop In Germanymentioning

confidence: 99%

A study of 25 years of publication outputs in the German academic profession

2022

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In the weak evaluation state of Germany, full professors are involved in the traditional social governance partnership between the state, and the self-governing higher education institutions (HEI) and disciplinary associations. Literature suggests that formal and informal governance could trigger changes in academics’ publication behavior by valorizing certain publication outputs. In the article, secondary data from three surveys (1992, 2007 and 2018) is used for a multi-level study of the evolution of academics’ publication behavior. We find a trend toward the “model” of natural science publication behavior across all disciplines. On the organizational level, we observe that a strong HEI research performance orientation is positively correlated with journal articles, peer-reviewed publications, and co-publications with international co-authors. HEI performance-based funding is only positively correlated with the share of peer-reviewed publications. At the level of individual disciplines, humanities and social sciences scholars adapt to the peer-reviewed journal publication paradigm of the natural sciences at the expense of book publications. Considering how the academic profession is organized around reputation and status, it seems plausible that the academic profession and its institutional oligarchy are key contexts for the slow but steady change of academics’ publication behavior. The trend of changing academics’ publication behavior is partly related to HEI valorization of performance and (to a lesser extent) to HEI performance based-funding schemes, which are set by the strong academic profession in the weak evaluation state of Germany.

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The Relevance of the German Excellence Initiative for Inequality in University Funding

Cited by 13 publications

References 22 publications

Field size as a predictor of "excellence." The selection of subject fields in Germany's Excellence Initiative.

Field size as a predictor of "excellence." The selection of subject fields in Germany's Excellence Initiative.

Heterogeneous Regional University Funding and Firm Innovation: An Empirical Analysis of the German Excellence Initiative

A study of 25 years of publication outputs in the German academic profession

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