Excellence Initiatives to Create World-Class Universities: Do They Work?

Within the tertiary education system, research universities play a critical role in training the professionals, high-level specialists, scientists, and researchers needed by the economy and in generating new knowledge in support of the national innovation system. In this context, governments want to make sure that their top universities are actually operating at the cutting edge of intellectual and scientific development. A major concern has therefore been to identify the most effective method for inducing substantial and rapid progress in a country's top universities. In order to accelerate the process of improving their top universities, several governments have launched so-called ＂excellence initiatives,＂ consisting of large injections of additional funding to boost their university sector. The purpose of this article is to assess the impact of these initiatives on the universities involved and on the rest of the tertiary education system. While the first section of the chapter analyzes the main features of excellence initiatives, the second part examines their results as well as their limitations.