A Budding German Ivy League

Munich is quickly establishing itself as a center for excellence in higher education in Germany. Europe is the next step

“It is not acceptable that in the worldwide ranking of universities we find only two European ones among the top ten. This is really something that hurts me,” said EU Commission Vice-President Günter Verheugen in his keynote address to the Fifth Munich Economic Summit last May. “And the two —Oxford and Cambridge— are in the United Kingdom, and that hurts me as a German even more.”

Now Germany is starting to do something about it. On October 13, the German Research Foundation announced that three universities had been selected as “Elite Universities” in the first round of the so-called “Excellence Initiative” that aims to improve the quality of German universities at an international level. The chosen three are Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) and the Technische Universität München , and the Universität Karlsruhe.

This new designation means that each of these universities will receive around 21 million euros (US$ 26 million) per year in extra funds until 2011, helping them accelerate their dash for a slot among the hallowed international top ten. It also means that if you want to study economics at an elite university in Germany, you can only do it at the LMU—to which, incidentally, the Ifo Institute for Economic Research is closely associated as an “Institute at LMU”, and of which the Center for Economic Studies forms a part.  

The two Munich universities were not chosen out of the blue: in the past several years, universities located in southern Germany have steadily raised their standing in and out of the country. While a sizeable number of Nobel prizes have been collected in the past, the last one in 2005 by the physics department of LMU, the humanities are having a harder time to catch up. Nevertheless, at least the economics faculty is on the move. In September, for instance, the German business and financial daily Handelsblatt published a ranking of top economics faculties in the German-speaking world as measured by publications in highly-ranked international journals. Topmost among the German institutions was —you guessed— LMU, followed by the universities of Bonn and Mannheim. A later update saw Bonn move up to the top after the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods was included with it.

(Handelsblatt also conducted a survey on the international publishing success of German economists. Read article here.)