What is a university of the calibre of Oxford or Harvard worth? Germany reckons a cool €1.9 billion, but what has this money achieved?

GERMANY has long been a science powerhouse, quietly turning out high-quality research without any headline-grabbing institutions like Oxbridge or the Ivy League. Then, in 2005, the government decided to change this, and set up the (EI). Putting aside ideals of equality, and with €1.9 billion behind it, the EI set out to sort the wheat from the chaff, or rather the country’s excellent institutions from the merely good.

“Germany always had an ideal that every university was equal,” says Beate Konze-Thomas, head of programmes and infrastructure at the German Research Foundation (DFG). “But for several reasons, not least the money, it is just impossible to have 130 brilliant universities.”

The five-year programme, funded by the DFG and the German Council of Science and Humanities, aimed to find the best institutions and make them better. The start of the initiative prompted intense competition, with international peer review panels judging each university’s proposal for funds based on plans to support the best research, expand opportunities for young researchers, foster interdisciplinary research and increase levels of collaboration.

In total, 39 graduate schools and 37 “Clusters of Excellence” across 30 universities were selected to each receive €1 million and €6.5 million a year respectively. Nine of these universities’ plans were ambitious enough for them to receive the accolade of “elite” status, and the promise of an additional €68 million each over five years.

Increased funding has helped create an estimated 4000 new research jobs in these institutions, as well as the provision of up-to-date equipment and higher salaries. But the greatest effect has been on the institutes’ international standing, says Bernd Huber, president of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, which received €33 million. “If I go to the US or Japan, everybody knows about this Excellence Initiative,” he says.

Institutes labelled as “elite” have also been more successful in attracting additional funding from regional governments and the European Union, says Konze-Thomas. And while the DFG stresses that it will take a decade for a handful of institutions to emerge as the best, overall standards are improving. In the all but six German institutions improved on their 2009 positions, and German universities in the top 200 gained an average of 20 places.

Status symbol

While the heads of the institutions see the EI as the biggest shake-up in 20 years, the effect on the ground has not always been so noticeable. “We are seen as a university of excellence, but it’s more about status than anything,” says Diego Reyes, a Colombian PhD student at the University of Freiburg, one of the “elite” institutions. “Most of what I know of the initiative comes from Wikipedia.”

But the shake-up has allowed some graduate schools and excellence clusters to try out new ways of working. For example, the Aachen Institute for Advanced Studies in Computational Engineering Science (AICES) gives junior academics greater independence by making sure their research groups are associated with no single professor, and that they sit outside the usual university structure.

Clusters also allow researchers to approach a problem from new angles. “We’ve built a completely new infrastructure rather than being restricted to the traditional departments,” says Matthias Drieß, coordinator of the cluster of excellence in catalysis at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB). “Senior and junior scientists perform joint research across six disciplines. There’s an atmosphere of creativity.”

The TUB cluster involves three Berlin universities, a Fraunhofer centre, two Max Planck Institutes and the chemical company BASF, which has contributed €8 million to the project. Almost half of the EI-funded projects bring together at least two research institutes, fostering greater collaboration between the country’s many research bodies, something that hasn’t always proved easy.

The initiatives have also tackled German academia’s age-old problem of the near endless doctorate by providing more supervisors, imposing time limits on PhDs and convening thesis committees. Other problems still remain, however. The number of female researchers remains low, despite targeted recruitment drives.

Tenured positions remain few and far between, making job security a problem for young researchers, says Reinhard Jahn, who is now director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. “I went through this myself when my five-year contract at a Max Planck Institute was terminated,” he says. “In the end I went to Yale University and stayed for six years.” Luckily for Germany, Jahn returned a fully fledged professor, but not every researcher who leaves the country returns. With its cash injection, the EI hopes to entice back more émigrés.

Foreign researchers are also a target, and here the EI investment seems to be paying off. Surveys by the DFG show that 12 per cent of professors in the newly created positions come from abroad, as do 25 per cent of junior or assistant professors and a third of doctoral students in the new positions.

But language remains a barrier, especially to long-term prospects, says David Kellen, a Portuguese psychology postdoc at the University of Freiburg. “It’s almost impossible to get tenure without teaching, and that means speaking German,” he says. “The system will spit me out eventually.”

The situation is changing as courses are increasingly taught in English, says Marek Behr, a computational engineer at AICES. “In Germany, of course the daily language is German, but this is something universities are addressing to create multilingual environments.”

Winners and losers

An extension of the EI to a second €2.7 billion phase, running from 2012 to 2017, has been warmly welcomed by universities and research institutes alike. Yet the system is far from perfect. A competitive process that occupies entire universities with paperwork every five years cannot continue forever, says Huber. “Maybe after a third round some stabilisation must occur.”

Huber has another suggestion. Universities are primarily funded by state governments, he says, but based on the initiative, the federal government should choose some institutes to back permanently. “In my view, the government needs to create federal universities which receive sufficient funding to be competitive on an international basis.”

Groups that fund research warn that concentrating on successful subject areas risks smothering other spots of brilliance. “The chances of small units getting excellence funding are decreasing, and I think this will change the university landscape,” says Enno Aufderheide, secretary general of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, one of Germany’ long-standing research institutions. “Right now it is OK, but you have to be careful to maintain balance and diversity.”

It also has not gone unnoticed that tighter financial times can encourage a focus on elite institutions. Many countries are emulating Germany, says Konze-Thomas. “The first decisions for a similar initiative have already been taken in Spain, Israel and in Japan,” she says.

While the wedge driven between the haves and have-nots remains unpopular with some, the DFG is unapologetic. “If you look at the map of EI sites in Germany you see a lot of white spaces – universities that did not receive anything,” says Konze-Thomas. “They think they will disappear from the map of quality in research totally, but if you have a competition, you have winners and losers.”

For the country as a whole, however, the EI seems to be working, says Alec Wodtke, a physical chemist from the US now at the University of Göttingen. “China is coming on strong, but I think Germany is probably the best country in the world to be a scientist right now.”

THE day is Wednesday 20 October, 2010. �Ӱ�ԭ��s and campaigners from all corners of the UK hold their breath, awaiting the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review. They are bracing themselves for their research budgets to be slashed, with cuts as high as 25 per cent rumoured before the government lays out its plan to shrink the nation’s debt.

A sigh of relief. The result is surprisingly kind to science, with the budget frozen for the next four years. In the days that followed, former president of the Royal Society, astronomer Martin Rees, said the review was “very welcome news”. The chief executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC), John Savill, said it meant the UK would “retain a strong and vibrant research base”.

So time to pop open the champagne? Not quite. The £4.6 billion allocated every year for the next four years does not mean that science is getting off scot-free. The responses of Savill and Rees should be taken as a collective sigh of relief rather than a celebration, says director of the , Imran Khan. Although the cuts were not the “game over” scenario many feared, the US, France and Germany are increasing their spending in science and higher education (see ‘Science budget swings’ diagram).

In the UK, when you consider inflation, the funding freeze effectively means that we are going to be spending 9 per cent less in four years’ time, says Khan. The science community “is still in for a tough four years”.

One relief is that the funding will be safely ring-fenced, so it cannot be pinched to plug gaps in other departments. But for every up there is a down: the fence does not include the £750 million estimated to be needed for “capital spending”. This money, used by research councils to build and maintain facilities and pay international subscriptions, will be cut by 52 per cent (accounting for inflation). Universities are also feeling the pain. From 2012 they will get 40 per cent less for teaching, a loss of £2.9 billion.

In the field

“There is still good news around,” says Janet Metcalfe, head of the researcher development organisation . Levels of investment and infrastructure building over the past 10 years have been good, she says. “That base is still going to be there. We’re just going to have to find ways to be more cost effective, to build stronger networks and collaborate more.”

However, research councils other than the MRC – the only one to have its budget kept in line with inflation – may see their budgets reduced as their fixed funding pot effectively shrinks thanks to inflation (see ‘Shrinking feeling’ graph). Grants are unlikely to be drastically reduced or rescinded, but who receives them might change, says Luke Georghiou, professor of science and technology policy at the University of Manchester. “Many research councils have sets of core institutions they already have closer relations with and I expect there will be more focus [on these institutions],” says Georghiou. Tony Bell, national secretary of the union Prospect, suggests that government priority areas, including health, environment, food security and animal health research, may feel most of the benefit.

Meanwhile, the effects of universities losing a big chunk of their teaching budget are going to be hard to predict, says Rob McCready from the University and College Union. “There’s a symbiotic relationship between teaching and research within departments,” he says. “If departments are going to receive basically no or much reduced public funding and have to get the money in through students, that will create an instability that will have knock-on effects for research.”

Some universities and research institutions are already facing a two-year staff pay freeze and redundancies following relatively small cuts, announced in June 2010. “People will leave and won’t be replaced; as a result workloads go up,” McCready says. Top-end universities that can attract higher prices will fare better, says Bell, but smaller universities could close.

Beyond the public sector

So while the public sector tightens its belt, could working in industry be a better option? The government is keen to see a return on its investment in science through growth in industrial sectors. Commitments such as the £1 billion for the Green Investment Bank, set up to aid the transition to a low-carbon economy, £220 million for the development of renewable technologies, and the introduction of academic-industrial collaborations called Technology and Innovation Centres, will add options for those with entrepreneurial ambitions.

Could charities plug some of the gaps? Don’t count on it, says Cancer Research UK’s head of , Simon Vincent. “We run schemes specifically aimed at getting careers kicked off and next year we’re hopefully going to fund more than we have done before… but the charity sector is pretty static at the moment.” People pay charities to do research, not prop up universities, says Vincent. In any case, he adds: “There’s little point in having a grant if you don’t have the university resources on which to [work].”

What should you do?

Given that it looks like this government, like its predecessor, seems to back science, the best advice is to hang in there, says Steve Miller, head of science and technology studies at University College London. Looking at the last time science was badly hit, in the 1980s, it was those who were most flexible and willing to hop from one short-term contract to another who survived, he adds.

It is also important to make yourself visible, says Janet Metcalfe of Vitae. “People need to look at how they can maximise the opportunities for themselves.” That includes making sure you are well known, publishing papers, and creating networks.

Stay in touch with unions and professional bodies, adds Rob McCready from the University and College Union. Campaigning prevented the of Sussex University’s chemistry department in 2006. “Don’t have a defeatist attitude about this,” he advises. “We worked with local MPs, councillors and students to highlight how important the subject was to the local community – and it worked.”

Another option is to go abroad. Many countries have seized science and engineering as a way to drive themselves out of recession and have boosted their funding, says Hilary Leevers, also at the CaSE. The US is not just preserving its health research spending, it’s doubling it. Such a move can also be good for your career: “�Ӱ�ԭ��s will take their UK network, integrate them into wherever they are abroad and we hope they will at some point return to the UK with a broader perspective,” she says.

Finally, there are opportunities if you are willing to look beyond research, says Stephen McAuliffe from the . “Being a good quality researcher might also mean being a good manager or motivator. There may be some very sensible stop-offs,” he says. Careers in science communication, policy and teaching leave the door open to return to research, says Leevers. “And many would say parliament could do with more people informed about science and engineering.”