German Fachhochschulen: Towards the End of a Success Story?

In 1971, the first Fachhochschulen (since the 1990s officially translated “Universities of Applied Sciences”) were established in the Federal Republic of Germany as a second type of higher education institutions beside the existing universities. This was the consequence of a long-lasting debate about the best possible response to the rising student enrolment quotas most countries experienced since about the 1960s. This debate absorbed views widespread in the U.S. that diversification of higher education is needed in the process of expansion of higher education, as, for example, expressed by Trow (1974, 1978), but led to different consequences than those in the U.S., i.e. the establishment of a two-type structure of the German higher education system.

Though eventually the establishment of the Fachhochschulen (FH) was widely praised as a success story, public debates on the best possible modes of diversification of higher education did not vanish, but continued to yield interest in Germany and also the international higher education research community (see Neave 1989; Meek et al. 1996; Teichler 1998). In Germany, for example, the view was shared by most key political actors in the early 1970s that universities and Fachhochschulen should be merged into Gesamthochschule (comprehensive universities). GHs were supposed to be the model institutions according to the Framework Act of Higher Education of 1976, but in the event only eleven such institutions were founded during the 1970s, and they remained an exception. Only six GHs established integrated study programmes and only a single institution, the University of Kassel, established a stage model of study programmes and degrees similar to a Bachelor-Master structure (see Cerych et al. 1981). Obviously, the majority of actors preferred clear dividing lines of inter-institutional diversity, and claims gained momentum that intra-institutional diversity, as, for example, realized in GHs, was likely to water down academic quality on the part of research and was likely to reinforce an academic drift as far as curricular approaches and students’ choices are concerned.