Workshop 24-25 November 2016
Globalising practices in the governance of higher education and research
Globalising Practi
ces in the Governance of Higher Education and Research is a research programme that bridges the divide between research on higher education and research policy. The programme is built around three cases which together shed light on how the practices that now dominate the governance of science disseminate in the European context and beyond. The cases explored are the role of the ESF in the diffusion of governance practices; the development of global rankings of higher education and the evolution of competitive funding for basic research in the European Research Area.
At the workshop, Professor Benedetto Lepori of the University of Lugano will give a keynote lecture that is open to the public.
This workshop is part of the joint USIAS Fellowship of Merle Jacob (University of Lund), Dietmar Braun (University of Lausanne) and Niilo Kauppi (CNRS Strasbourg and Academy of Finland).
Keynote lecture: US and European universities. Is the difference money?
The large differences in the level of scientific production and of international reputation between top-US and European universities are well-known, as represented for example by international research rankings. It has been speculated that these differences are generated by differences in governance and funding in the two systems, with the US system promoting more competition and differentiation and concentrating funding in top-ranked universities. In his keynote speech, professor Lepori will present an empirical analysis of such differences. By matching data from the US Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS; http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/) and the European Tertiary Education Register dataset (ETER; www.eter-project.com), enriched with bibliometric data from the Leiden Ranking, it is possible to provide a disaggregated analysis of differences in characteristics and level of funding of individual Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in both systems. This analysis moves beyond comparisons based on aggregated figures and averages to focus on differences in the distributions across the two systems and relevant variables.
The analysis displays a complex pattern of differences across different dimensions. The US system is more diverse in terms of institutional status and types of HEIs, while in Europe universities constitute the core of the system both in research and in education. In terms of activities, the US system is more distributed in terms of education than Europe, but much more concentrated in terms of research. We highlight two strong differences in the funding system: first, the differentiation of funding channels in the US (State contributions, federal research grants, donations, tuition fees) as contrasted with the dominance of the government core allocation in Europe and, second, the much stronger concentration of resources in the top-US universities, whose budget is multiple times the budget of the best-funded European universities. We also show that the volume of research output (measured through scientific publications) increases almost linearly with the funding volume, while reputation (measured through citations) scales more than proportionally with funding, implying that stronger concentration of funding is associated with higher international reputation. Implications of these findings for public policies are discussed.
Keynote Speaker: Benedetto Lepori
Professor Benedetto Lepori holds a PhD in Communication Sciences with a thesis on the Swiss research and higher education policy at the University of Lugano in 2004. At the University of Lugano,he is titular professor at the Faculty of Communication science, InterDisciplinary Institute of Data Science (IDIDS). He is also head of the Research Service of the University and of the Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana.
His research interests cover a broad range of topics in research and higher education studies. He is a recognized specialist in the analysis of research policies and, especially, public research funding. In this area, he coordinated the PRIME project on public project funding and was co-coordinator of the European Contract on Joint and Open Programs (JOREP). He has also worked extensively in the domain of higher education indicators and governance; he participated in PRIME-AQUAMETH and the European MIcroData study, and is currently coordinator of the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER). He was also chair of the European Network of Indicator Designers conference series and is currently member of the Coordination Board of the RISIS project on developing research infrastructure for research policy studies. More generally, his research focuses on issues of higher education governance, university management and theory of S&T indicators.
He has published extensively on these topics in journals like Organization Studies, Research Policy, Science and Public Policy, Research Evaluation, Evaluation, Journal of Informetrics, Scientometrics, Higher Education and Studies in Higher Education.
