2.32: 2 Topics, 1 Episode: German Higher Education and U-Multirank

Hello, I'm Alex Usher, and this is the World of Higher Education podcast.

A bit of a change this week. Our scheduled episode with Dr. Andrea Peto and Dr. Jo-Anne Dillabough about illiberal universities has been moved to next week. This week, instead, we're trying a little experiment: talking to my colleague, Dr. Gero Federkeil, who is head of international projects at the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung, or Center for Higher Education, in Gütersloh, Germany, about two totally unrelated topics.

The first has to do with the changing profile of university enrollments in Germany, a subject on which Gero has recently published an article in University World News. Part of the story is one we've heard about before from guests such as Angela Young Chi Hou in Taiwan and Jisun Jung in Korea, and that's about the effects of demographic transition on higher education enrollments. But there are other shifts to note as well, by geography, by field of study, and by public private status. I was most interested to hear about how famously free tuition Germany is now undergoing a big shift towards private fee paying higher education.
But we also talked about rankings. Gero and his colleagues at the Center for Higher Education are most famous for having created something called multidimensional university rankings, a process that gives users control over what indicators Can be foregrounded or backgrounded when comparing institutions. It's an approach CHE pioneered in Germany in a ranking produced in conjunction with Die Zeit and globally through something called U-Multirank, a European commission backed ranking system for universities around the globe. But while UMultiRank has had some success in recruiting institutions to provide data for the rankings, it's had a harder time convincing students to give up league table style rankings with all their spurious accuracy. And its fate has been up in the air for the last couple of years. Gero gives us the inside scoop on the future of U-Multirank and the data it generates.

So without further ado, let's get to the interview.

Alex Usher (AU): Gero, before we start the rest of our story about demographics, help us understand the German tertiary system as a whole. Now, some young Germans will go to university, some will go to a Fachhochschule, which occupies a place similar to Polytechnics in the Canadian system, though the primary credential is a bachelor's degree. Some will go to apprenticeships, although that's considered part of the secondary system rather than tertiary. Am I missing anything here? And of this, what proportion of students end up going to university?

Gero Federkeil (GF): At the moment, we have 1.7 million in universities, 1.2 million in Fachhochschule, what we call the Universities of Applied Science, and also 1.2 million in vocational education.

AU: That’s quite a bit. Now, has the university share been growing over time? We always hear in North America about skilled trades and apprenticeships having parity of esteem, but my understanding is that universities have been taking a larger and larger share of enrollments over time. Is that true?

GF: The two types together, the universities and the Universities of Applied Science, they took over a larger share. Among the two, the shift was rather to the Universities of Applied Science.

AU: Okay, that's interesting. Now as you wrote in your article for University World News, Germany is one of the many countries around the world experiencing a demographic shift and one that looks set to continue for quite some time. What is the demographic situation in Germany currently? How big a decline in the youth population has there been so far, and what do things look like for the next five or ten years?

GF: Yes, after we had the children of the baby boomers, we then had a decrease of about 10%. For the next years, the young people at the age of entering higher education will remain more or less stable within the next 10 years. Then there will be another decline again.

AU: One thing that you've noted again in your article was that it's not just that we're seeing shifts in the number of students, we're also seeing shifts in field of study. Germany's seeing a decrease in humanities. That's fairly common around the world. But also seeing a decrease in engineering enrollments, which is not common around the world. That's actually against the global trend. What's going on there? Why is engineering out of favor?

GF: Yeah, we are really not sure about this and we were surprised very much about this. Because normally the numbers of new enrollments in engineering, they are very sensitive to labor market signals. But at the moment, there's a very positive labor market for engineering graduates. So this does not explain it, so we don't really know. In particular, it's the old large engineering fields like mechanical engineering and electrical engineering that are decreasing, whereas some we might call them more innovative, combining engineering with something else like environmental things are increasing. It's the more traditional subjects that have this decrease in numbers. What's also very interesting is at the same time, we had a large increase in the number of new enrollments in computer science. Maybe there is something like a shift from hardware to software embedded in this.

AU: That's interesting. You also noted an increase in things like the care professions, health, things like that.

GF: Yes, exactly. That's a second trend. There is a huge demand in terms of labor force and qualified people working in this sector. So we have this in nursing, physiotherapy, psychology, social work and fields like that.

AU: Right. Now, one trend that you noted, which I find very interesting because it's not just Germany that's seeing it. We're seeing it in France, we're seeing it in Spain, too. That's a move to private institutions or that enrollment is shifting from public to private institutions. In Germany and France, at least, these are countries where people make a lot out of the fact that university is free. That's a desirable thing, that's a great attribute of the system. I know that Germany went through a phase between 2006 and 2012 or 13 where a few states tried to bring in tuition fees, and they were deeply unpopular. Yet, now we're seeing a shift to enrollment in private institutions. What's the issue here? Is it that public institutions are too crowded, and people just want to go somewhere a little less full? Or are private universities offering something that's qualitatively different, that's really attracting students even though these things might be available at public institutions too?

GF: First of all, I was surprised seeing this development too. I think there are two reasons. One is, as you said, that still many of the public institutions are indeed crowded. The other thing is, and it may slightly be linked to the experiences during the Corona pandemic. The private institutions are very good in offering very flexible modes of studying. They have different models of studying part time per week, per month in blocks, and together with combining studying and practical work, so they are very flexible in offering tailor made study options for students. I think this is one of the major reasons why they are so popular at the moment. Even despite their fees.

AU: So are they attracting a different type of student? Is it an older student that goes to this? Someone who has a higher opportunity cost and needs more flexibility?

GF: No, I don't think it's just addressing or focusing on older or mature students. I think, in general, students are getting more diverse in Germany, and I think they pick indeed some of the non-traditional students who have prior experiences in working and have some family obligations that they need more flexible modes of studying. So I think, it’s a mix of different aspects and different types of students they address.

AU: So coming back to the demographic issue, I expect that's not the same everywhere in the country, right? It would probably be a bigger deal in the eastern part of the country, the old German Democratic Republic, and you might even have growing universities in, say, Bavaria or other parts of the country. Is that the case? Is it really a regionalized phenomenon?

GF: Yeah, it is regionalized, but even more, it's more localized. We have some local areas, cities, and the surroundings that are still booming and where others have a tremendous decline in the numbers of students. It’s very much linked to the shifts in the demand for different fields of study. For example, we have one city, it's called Darmstadt. They have a very strong marketing of the city as a city of science and universities. They have a university and the University of Applied Science with a strong focus on engineering, and they had really severe cutbacks in the number of students and hence, the region is very much affected but simply because of their strong focus on engineering.

AU: What's going to happen to universities in these areas where you've got greater demographic decline? Over the past few weeks on the show, we've spoken to experts in countries like Korea and Taiwan, where there's a real prospect of institutions closing in response to demographic shifts. What do you think governments will do in response to falling enrollments? And what kinds of things are we seeing institutions do to help themselves?

GF: Yes, I think at the moment there's no debate yet about closing some of the universities or the Universities of Applied Science. Maybe some will become smaller. In the universities themselves, I think many people still think that it's a release from this overburden they had in the past and coming back to a new normal and maybe realizing something like a quality dividend by having less students than in the past. But for some, it may become a danger of their existence in the future this trend continues like it is at the moment.

AU: So you just mentioned a quality dividend and that's where student numbers fall, but public funding stays the same, so institutions get more euros per student. Is that realistic? Won't governments adjust funding to student population levels?

GF: Yeah, that's the big question indeed in Germany at the moment. I think in some of the states, the funds will be stable, but I think in some states, maybe again in the primarily in the east, the funding will be cut so that this dividend will not be realized in the end. There will be debates. It's not just the ministries for education, but it's the ministries of finance who have to fight about this trends and the consequences.

AU: Gero, I want to turn from events in Germany to a slightly different subject your organization, CHE, Center for Higher Education in Germany, has been one of the driving forces behind something called U-Multirank which is a very different kind of global ranking from the traditional league tables style and I know you call it multi-dimensional ranking. I suspect not all our listeners are familiar with it, so could you give us a sense of what multi-dimensional ranking means?

GF: Yes, in the first instance multidimensional means that we compare and rank institutions indicator by indicator and we don't calculate an overall composite indicator out of weighted individual indicators because we think universities they are good on some things and less good on other things. Therefore it does not make sense to calculate composite indicators where one number in the end measures the performance of a complex institution like a university. On the second, multidimensional ranking means that we do not calculate a league table as the other traditional rankings or league tables do, but instead we are sorting institutions into five different groups of performance from top performers to low performers to avoid this false impression of exactness that league tables do by suggesting that number 10 is better than number 15 and that number 121 is better than number 126. So these are the major two elements of our multidimensional approach.

AU: How did U-Multirank come about? Because many of the big rankings are funded by consultancy and data services that the rankers run themselves, and they were started with profit in mind. How did U-Multirank start, and how was it funded?

GF: Yeah, there were two strands of discussion that lead to the implementation of U-Multirank. One was among people and organizations that were working on ranking issues like CHE or colleagues like CHEPS from the Netherlands. We wanted to develop further the national ranking we had in Germany with the same multi-dimensional approach to a European level. And at the same time, there was an initiative in the European Union to develop, let's say a better ranking than the traditional commercial league tables. Hence the European Union took up the initiative and decided to fund this alternative approach to comparing and rank ranking universities.

AU: Interesting. So, you've been doing it for over a decade now. I seem to recall it started around 2010 or 2011. How successful has U-Multirank been in attracting both users and institutional participants?

GF: Yeah, I think in answering to this question, honestly, we have to distinguish between institutions and the academic scene. I think we were very successful with our approach in addressing higher education institutions and higher education stakeholders, because many of them think that this is a better way to compare universities than with the traditional league tables with their composite scores and their league table positions. But we had some problems addressing students. On the one hand, U-Multirank is more complex than a simple league table because we cannot say, “well, the best university is University X,” but we have to say, “okay, if you're interested in this aspect of performance, these universities are the top, but if you look on other dimensions of performance other universities are top,” and this was well difficult to communicate to students who are in a way lay users of rankings. They are not the experts like the people from the universities. Of course we did not have communication and commercial power that the commercial rankings have to build large communication strategies to students.

AU: Although you do have that with your partnership with Desight for the German rankings, which are built on the same thing, right? And I assume you actually get pretty good readership or and user numbers from that.

GF: Yes. That's different to our national ranking, but in in Europe or in this international scene, we could not find any similar media partner from with a European focus or international focus.

AU: Yeah. It's a big advantage that the Times Higher has for its rankings. I noticed from your website though, the data collection seems to have stopped in 2022. So you've been on hiatus for a little bit of time. What's the story? Why the suspension in activity?

GF: Our last funding period from the European Commission ended and there was a little break and the European Commission decided to implement a new initiative. It's now called the European Higher Education Sector Observatory. This is a new project where we are involved now which will integrate different data and transparency tools of the European Union, like U-Multirank. Another is the system called the European Tertiary Education Register. This is a database of basic data on higher education institutions based on data from national statistical authorities and there are some other data sources like data from the Erasmus Mobility Scheme of the European Union, some like some smaller surveys among like Eurostudens and Eurograduates. They will all be integrate into one platform and in this context we will develop a number of new tools and projects. One will be called a European higher education sector scoreboard. This is a set of indicators based on the country level, on the system level, which should monitor the policy agenda and goals of the European commission on the number of strands. It's about innovative education. It's about digitalization, sustainability, competitiveness. The second tool is a development of a benchmarking tool for higher education institutions. This will largely be based on the benchmarking tool that we developed in U-Multirank. It will just be modernized, updated. The third thing, and this again will focus on students is the implementation of a new tool called the European Higher Education Student Observatory. This will be a tool focusing on student users. On the one hand, on students who want to who are mobile within Europe and students from outside Europe who want to come to Europe. It will provide information on study options and profiles of European universities. So these are the major tools, and this benchmarking tool and the student observatory, the legacy and experience and data from U-Multirankwill feed in.

AU: So U-Multirank will exist in two forms, one for benchmarking for institutions and one, something a little bit more student focused.

GF: Yes. And implicitly, this means that U-Multirank will not continue to produce any rankings.

AU: So, the data will still be there, but it won't, the output will look different.

GF: Yes, exactly.

AU: Okay, good. And you've got the contract for that is my understanding. So there was a hiatus while there was a request for proposals, but now there's now things are up again. It's 2024. When can we expect new data?

GF: Yes, I think the first version of this system level scoreboard will be published in the second half of the year. In autumn, we will start to collect new data in an institutional survey and a student survey for an update of the benchmarking tool and for the development of this student observatory. The benchmarking tool will be updated in late autumn, probably, and this student observatory will be developed within the next two years.

AU: That's all the time we have for today. Gero Federkeil, thank you so much for joining us.

GF: Yeah, thank you.

AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany McLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, please don't hesitate to contact us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guests will actually be Dr. Andrea Peto and Dr. Jo-Anne Dillabough of Central European University and Cambridge University, respectively. They will be joining us to talk about the rise of illiberal universities in Europe and North America. Bye for now.