The Changing Ideas And Paradigms Of German Universities

Abstract: The German federal and states governments have jointly launched the policy of Excellence Initiative of German universities in the year of 2005. Up to now, It has adopted two rounds of competitive selection, within which 39 graduate schools, 37 clusters of excellence and 9 future concepts of universities are chosen out to be differently financed for a period of 5 years. The total subsidy amounts to 1.9 billion Euros. Given the condition that the German higher education is generally suffering from the lack of financial resources, the federal and states governments have come to the agreement of providing extra financial aid to a small number of selected institutions. Its purpose is to promote young researchers and outstanding doctoral students, to enable German university locations to establish internationally visible, competitive research and training facilities, to develop top-level university research in Germany and increase its competitiveness at an international level. It gives priority to the development of a small number of elite institutions of higher education and setting up beacons of German higher education, with the purpose of promoting the internal competition and activating the national university system. So the essence of Excellence Initiative lies in the reform of public higher education resources allocation mechanism. The Government doesn't subsidize all the universities equally any longer but the scarce resources will be allocated to the minority known as the"beacon"of elite institutions. In this sense, this reform will have far-reaching effects on the paradigm and ideas of German higher education development.Based on the global overview of the priority policy of international higher education development, the first chapter puts forward the theme of this paper, namely how is the Excellence Initiative transforming the development paradigm from equal development to none-balanced strategy, and also the significance of this study and research methodology are discussed here; Literature review in the second chapter will go through the existing researches and their results with relevance to the Excellence Initiative; In the third chapter, it is mainly descriptive analyses of the international and social backgrounds of this policy, the implementation process and the results of the two–round selections; As the most important part of this paper, Chapter four is devoted to the changing ideas of German university development: from the equitable development to the adoption of competition concept and then the non- balanced competition under Excellence Initiative; It will be discussed in chapter five the possible impacts of the Excellence Initiative on the German higher education system. The preliminary judgment would be that the Excellence Initiative would lead to a pyramid-like hierarchical structure within the German higher education system, the social resources of higher education would be allocated non-proportionally accordingly and so on. All of these will definitely have far-reaching effects on the future competiveness and image of German higher education as a whole.