Academic Questions 1: Core Capabilities

German universities typically do not run dormitories, food services, career services, counseling services, financial aid offices, intramural sports (to say nothing of extramural sports), and the like. Universities do teaching and research.

Student services exist in Germany, of course, but they are provided by separate organizations—the local Studentenwerke—not directly by the universities. There is a Studentenwerk for each city that has universities, and its services—housing, dining, distribution of financial aid, counseling on various matters, help with finding jobs, child care for students with children, assistance for students with disabilities—are available to students at all the local post-secondary institutions.* (There are eighteen of these in Berlin, including research universities, fine arts and music conservatories, and technical/community-college-type institutions.)

Separating the student services organization from the academic (teaching and research) organization not only lets each organization focus on what it does best. It also prevents student services from raiding the academic budget—which can be a temptation in the US, especially for lower-tier schools competing for students. Allegedly some US universities have recently considered addressing their budget crises by eliminating economics, English, history, physics, political science, and/or computer science departments while keeping indoor rock climbing walls, extramural sports, and the like.  (For details see an article in Slate, 26 November 2013:  http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2013/11/minnesota_state_moorhead_could_cut_18_academic_programs_why_do_colleges.html)

Who knows how much of a university’s total budget should go to student services and how much to pure teaching and research? And how much of the university administration’s time should be spent making this decision? It does simplify life for the German universities not to have to answer these questions.

Prying the academic and student-services functions apart probably does save money. Two strong forces stick them together in the US, however. First, the US university model is half German (the research university) and half English (the residential liberal arts college), and for the English half of the tradition, the dorms and so on are part of the community-building which is part of the mission.

Second, American universities are understood to be of highly varying quality, and within a given quality band they compete with each other, sometimes in student services as well as in academics. Shared services seem incompatible with competition and quality variation. Can you imagine Harvard and MIT and  Roxbury Community College all sharing services? The German universities, in contrast, don’t compete with each other—especially not for students—to  anything like the same extent. 

And in spite of the efforts made in recent years to identify a handful of “excellent” universities in Germany, there is less sense of quality variation here. Even to the extent that there are well-understood distinctions—for example between the community-college-type institutions, relatively weak research universities, and relatively strong research universities—the German view is: why should this make a difference to what the students eat for lunch?

*The Studentenwerke are funded by a mix of income-producing activities (housing and food services), student fees (about 50 euros a semester, last time I looked), and government subsidies (part of government support of higher education). Each Studentenwerk has professional management, supervised by a board that includes (variously, depending on the state) representatives of the student associations, the universities, the state government, and/or the staff of the Studentenwerk.