Differentiation and Competition in Higher Education: recent trends in the Federal Republic of Germany

renewed interest. The reasons for this are several: inter alia, the ideological-political preferences of the new Bonn coalition after the 1982 change of government, the continuing precarious situation of the public budgets at both the Federal and Linder levels, the general reduced priority of higher education vis-a-vis other public responsibilities; furthermore, a shift in priority within higher education itself away from concerns about equality of educational opportunity and the abolition of entrance restrictions to concerns about creating a new elite to cope with the tasks of research, development and technology in higher education, and about expected decreases in student numbers as a result of the dramatic demographic decline of the age-cohorts entering higher education in the late 1980s. In the following section, a brief statistical survey of the development of the higher education system in the 1970s and early 1980s will be given so as to provide a better understanding of the present debate in the Federal Republic of Germany. This debate, which centres around the issues of differentiation, of efficiency and effectiveness, of accountability and performance indicators in higher education, is still at an early stage as compared with the measures already taken in other countries, such as Finland, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The subsequent sections will therefore concentrate on a description of the positions taken by the Bund (Federal Government), the Wissenschaftsrat (Science Council) and the Westdeutsche Rektorenkonferenz (West German Conference of Rectors). Some recent research activities, with their results and implications, will then be presented. In a concluding section, an attempt will be made to evaluate the present debate, and some possible future developments will be outlined.