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The article discusses the idea of the modern university in light of the thought of philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, noting his influence on German universities. The author addresses the subsequent fate of the idea of the university due to mass education, government involvement in funding research, and the continuing importance of student participation in research. Other topics include the role of university presidents, academic-industrial collaboration, and the efforts of the United States government to promote diversity within student bodies.

Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States experienced a substantial decline in undergraduate degrees in economics from 1992 through 1996, followed immediately by a modest recovery. This cycle does not conform to overall degree trends, shifts in the gender composition of undergraduate populations, or changing interests of female students in any of the four countries. There is no evidence that changes in the “price“ of a degree to students, tightened marking standards or degree requirements, or changes in pedagogical methods caused the cycle. Jobs for economics graduates declined in the United States between 1988 and 1990 and thereafter recovered. With a two-year recognition lag, the pattern of employment prospects fits the U.S. slump in economics degrees perfectly. Unfortunately, employment patterns in the other three countries are inconsistent with the degree cycle. The explanation that fits the economic degree pattern best is interest in business education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many students find themselves scrambling to acquire fresh skills when the need arises unexpectedly something that is happening more frequently as research becomes ever more interdisciplinary, says Michael Gottesman, deputy director for intramural research at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). As with career development, the creative nature of biomedical research often leads students to unexpected places for which they are rarely prepared. But there are several ways to deal with one's unknown and unexpected training needs. Young scientists can seek out PhD programmes with formal training components that level the playing field for each new class. For the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, providing a mechanism to ensure that all of its PhD students can make use of its resources is essential, says Iain Mattaj, the lab's scientific director. Many graduate students do postdoctoral research in a field that is different from their dissertation research, sometimes to pick up new skills and techniques.

The article discusses the international competitiveness of national higher education systems in U.S. and Germany in which the two countries are borrowing structures in education reform. The authors point out that the practice of importing selected parts of the U.S. system of higher education into other national systems is widespread, making these transfers a phenomenon of global relevance and importance. The international competitiveness of national higher education systems is an important political issue in many countries in which these politics drive some governments to reform their systems by borrowing elements from societies with systems thought to be superior.

Trends in the gender gap in college completion for the U.S. and Germany show that the gender gap has closed in Germany as it has in the U.S., but, unlike the U.S., women have not yet achieved inequality in rates of tertiary degree attainment, let alone overtaken men. A central reason for this difference is the fact that the relationship between parental education and gender-specific rates of tertiary degrees has not changed over time in Germany as it has in the U.S. The lack of change in Germany is consistent with both environmental and family resource explanations for the reversal in the U.S., and provides additional support for resource and incentive-based theories of the female-favorable trends in rates of higher education completion in much of the industrialized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an approach for analyzing the institutional development of nanotechnology in Germany and the United States. This article presents several hypotheses for why both countries lead in the nanotechnology field despite different markets and employing different approaches. The proposed model examines nanotechnology in the context of higher education teaching and the labor market as well as professional associations and the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, faculty members are rewarded financially for prestige-maximizing publications. As a result, the balance between publishing and other activities such as teaching or public service may collapse, as argued by Leisyte, Enders, and de Boer (2009). In our paper, we focus on career-related rewards and study their impact on publication productivity to see whether economic incentives do indeed affect faculty behavior, as measured empirically. We compare economic incentives resulting from two different career systems, namely those within the German and the U.S. university systems. We derive three hypotheses regarding expected publication patterns and test them by comparing the lifetime publication patterns of German and U.S. business and economics faculty members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative studies describing the transition from higher education to work have often simplified the complex transition processes involved. In this paper we extend previous research by taking into account several steps that comprise labor market entry, e.g., recurrent education leading to more than one instance of labor market entry. By comparing Germany and the United States we also examine how the tertiary education systems influence these transitions via the mode of stratification (parallel tracks in Germany vs. consecutive tracks in the US), the coordination mechanism (state-controlled vs. market-based) and the degree of standardization in educational programs. In our empirical analyses using large-scale longitudinal survey data we find that transitions in the US are less standardized and regulated than in Germany. Furthermore, differences between students from lower- and higher-tier institutions are less marked than expected, both within and between the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research on diversity and diversity management in German organisations has significantly gained relevance over the last years. The reasons for this are socio-political and economic changes that make diversity a highly relevant topic. In higher education, there is currently much discussion on these concepts and an increasing number of institutions is introducing policies targeting a diverse student body. Taking a comparative approach, this paper analyses the origin of diversity management in the United States, discusses research on this topic in U.S. higher education and compares this with current developments in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assessment of university students’ economic knowledge has become an increasingly important research area within and across countries. Particularly, the different influences of prior education, native language, and gender as some of the main prerequisites on students’ economic knowledge have been highlighted since long. However, the findings are often only available within countries and focus on students who are at different levels of their studies or graduates. To remedy this research deficit, the goal of our article is to analyze the status of economic knowledge of students at the beginning of their course of studies and compare the effects of prior economic education, gender, and native language between the USA and Germany. Therefore, we used a translated and adapted version of the fourth edition of the Council for Economic Education'sTest of Understanding in College Economics(TUCE). The TUCE is an international measuring instrument that has been validated and widely been used in several countries to assess the economic knowledge of students in higher education. Since the curricular structure as well as higher education studies/programs in both countries is quite comparable, no tremendous general between-country effect has been expected. But as our results show, if micro- and macroeconomics are analyzed separately, divergent effects on the students’ economic knowledge were detected showing that prior education has a positive significant effect merely on micro test scores, while gender and native language are purely significant on macro test scores in both countries. In our conclusion, we discuss several reasons that might have caused these different effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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