Developing micro-based indicators of institutional differentiation in HE systems

The paper is based on the recent construction of a large dataset on European universities in six countries (UK, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Switzerland), covering 271 institutions. The European university system is largely based on public, government-funded, universally accessible institutions, formally of equal value. Variations around this fundamental characterization certainly exist, such as the admission system at Grand Ecoles in France, or the introduction of numerus clausus in some faculties (e.g. medical schools) in many countries. Also, in some countries differences are present between different types of higher education institutions: in so called dual systems (e.g. Netherlands) vocational training institutions are separated from universities, while in unitary systems such as United Kingdom large differences existed (and still exist) between universities and polytechnics. However, taking into account these national heterogeneities, it can be said that two elements strongly characterize the European model: the public role and the universality. It is important to note that, at least in the European institutional landscape, there is no intrinsic pressure towards specialization, rather the opposite is true. Having several missions tied together has been the usual way to comply with an expanding population of students under conditions of large national public funding, until the late ‘80s. Limited competition made it possible to maintain largely different (sometimes, conflicting) performance criteria within the same institutional borders, and to allocate resources in such a way that all groups could find the allocation acceptable. The reason is that limited competition (or abundant flows of resources) create large organizational slacks, permitting political consensus. Still, we find consistent evidence of a strong trend towards specialization of university profiles and hence of institutional differentiation of the system. We develop the rationale for specialisation and we build up a series of new indicators. We try to build up an operationalization of the notion of university strategy capitalizing on the available data. We are able to track the position and evolution of universities with respect to some structural elements: • research orientation, as measured by the share of PhD recipients over the total population of undergraduate students; • research intensity, as measured by average number of publications per unit of academic staff; • offering profile, introducing a distinction between generalist and specialist universities; • rate of growth in total number of undergraduate students; • degree of autonomy, as measured by the ratio between non-government funding sources and total funding. This is a preliminary effort to identify relevant dimensions and to capture emergent phenomena. We are very far from a complete characterization, but the results are encouraging. A detailed descriptive evidence is reported, while a temptative interpretation in the light of a theory of university strategy is proposed. Policy implications of the empirical evidence are also discussed.