ifo Institute: Five Universities in Germany Deemed Most Efficient in Their Use of Public Funds

For years, five of Germany’s universities have held the top spots when it comes to efficiency in spending funds. This is the result of a recent study published in ifo Schnelldienst. These top five institutions are the Universities of Flensburg, Lübeck, and Heidelberg, as well as Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) (see table for full rankings).

“We compared institutions’ spending with their earnings. As regards spending, we looked at each university’s expenses and staff, while for earnings, we looked at the number of most-cited publications and the number of graduates,” says Klaus Wohlrabe, co-author and Head of Surveys at the ifo Institute. The study’s other authors are Sabine Gralka from TU Dresden and Lutz Bornmann from the Max Planck Society in Munich.

“Overall, the German universities have achieved very similar rates of efficiency over a period of several years,” Wohlrabe adds. “Higher education in Germany is characterized above all by homogeneity, both of its institutions and over time. There is no top-performing group that is particularly efficient at parlaying its resources into excellent research achievements. This of course raises questions about the success of the German federal government’s Excellence Initiative. We had expected additional (research) funding to have had a positive impact on the efficiency of the universities receiving that funding.”

The study looked at 70 of the country’s 76 public universities for the 2004–2015 time period.

Rang	University	Average Points (rounded)
1	TU München	1,000
2	U Flensburg	1,000
3	U Heidelberg	1,000
4	U Lübeck	1,000
5	U München	1,000
6	U Koblenz-Landau	1,000
7	FU Berlin	1,000
8	U Köln	0,997
9	U Augsburg	0,992
10	U Freiburg i.Br.	0,991
11	Humboldt-Universität Berlin	0,974
12	TU Dresden	0,969
13	U Hamburg	0,966
14	U Leipzig	0,964
15	Bauhaus-U Weimar	0,958
16	U Bochum	0,953
17	U Karlsruhe	0,950
18	U Münster	0,949
19	U Ulm	0,946
20	U Potsdam	0,938
21	U Dortmund	0,938
22	Europa-U Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)	0,937
23	U Hildesheim	0,928
24	U Stuttgart	0,925
25	U Göttingen	0,921
26	U Passau	0,921
27	TU Berlin	0,911
28	U Bremen	0,906
29	U Frankfurt a.M.	0,905
30	U Würzburg	0,904
31	U Regensburg	0,901
32	TU Ilmenau	0,900
33	U Bielefeld	0,893
34	TU Braunschweig	0,891
35	TU Darmstadt	0,891
36	U Mainz	0,886
37	Fernuniversität Hagen	0,881
38	U Vechta	0,881
39	U Bonn	0,878
40	U Hannover	0,876
41	U Erlangen-Nürnberg	0,875
42	U Erfurt	0,872
43	U Kiel	0,869
44	U Bamberg	0,865
45	U Mannheim	0,856
46	U Kassel	0,855
47	TU Kaiserslautern	0,854
48	U Paderborn	0,854
49	U Jena	0,853
50	TH Aachen	0,835
51	U Bayreuth	0,830
52	U Duisburg-Essen	0,822
53	U Tübingen	0,812
54	U Rostock	0,786
55	U Hohenheim	0,783
56	U Oldenburg	0,777
57	U Osnabrück	0,776
58	TU Hamburg-Harburg	0,772
59	U Wuppertal	0,763
60	U Konstanz	0,755
61	U Siegen	0,754
62	U Greifswald	0,745
63	TU Bergakademie Freiberg	0,743
64	U Trier	0,712
65	U Magdeburg	0,701
66	U Halle	0,696
67	U Düsseldorf	0,693
68	U des Saarlandes Saarbrücken	0,640
69	TU Clausthal	0,601
70	TU Chemnitz	0,589