Keeping One’s Shiny Mercedes in the Garage: Why Higher Education Quantification Never Really Took Off in Germany

Abstract

The cybernetic dream of regulatory ‘dashboard control’ has taken off in the German higher education system. Both government regulators and university managers are engaged in the creation of waves of increasingly fine-grained quantitative data. Yet a wide range of recent case studies of the German higher education sector attest that in spite of this ‘datafication’ frenzy, the impact of the collected data mass on regulatory and managerial decision-making capacities seems to have remained relatively limited. This article explores why, in spite of the considerable investment in quantitative data infrastructures in the German higher education sector, this did not result in significant overt analytical capacity building. It explores three hypotheses: 1) a legal hypothesis according to which quantification is curbed by legal protections under the <em>Rechtsstaat</em>; 2) a dysfunctionality hypothesis which holds that decision makers reject quantification as a flawed and impracticable pursuit; and 3) an egalitarian federalism hypothesis which argues that Germany’s federal states seek to prevent commensurability to avoid comparison and competition. The article finds that, in spite of its inconspicuousness, quantification indeed does inform various central decision-making processes. However, different legal, political, and relational factors prompt decision makers to engage in a hybrid, tempered and, overall, untransparent application of numerical data.

Steered by Numbers: How Quantification Differentiates the Reform of a German University

“…The interviewees mentioned that the state compensates for: (i) tuition fees; (ii) negotiates performances directly with the university management (for example, student uptake); (iii) adds overhead resources to third-party funding; and (iv) allocates resources directly to chairs or faculties. All these programmes are initiated by politics (see also Hillebrandt, 2020). They are fragmented and vary greatly in terms of objectives and allocative procedures, but their common feature is the idea of rewarding achievement through differential allocation.…”

Editorial: Quantifying Higher Education: Governing Universities and Academics by Numbers

“…The articles by Kandiko Howson and Buckley (2020), Dix, Kaltenbrunner, Tijdink, Valkenburg, and de Rijcke (2020), and Huber (2020) take up aspects of the life cycle theme and offer case studies of quantification in each of the three countries illustrating how governance by numbers is designed, and how the various actors respond to signals of dysfunctionality that emerge over time. The regulatory nexus theme includes articles by Ringel, Brankovic, and Werron (2020), Hillebrandt (2020), and Krüger (2020). These authors address the emergence and usage of new numerical data infrastructures, paying special attention to the administrative and organisational capacities that these infrastructures enable, but also require.…”

Governance by Numbers: A Panopticon Reversed?

“…At the very least, it is an empirical question whether data collected by, for example, academia.edu has any impact on academics' everyday life. Contributions to this thematic issue emphasize this: They show that observers produce numbers without actually using them (Hillebrandt, 2020), that num-bers are produced without an explicit purpose (Kandiko Howson et al, 2020;Krüger, 2020), and that the purpose of observations can be challenged and contested (Dix et al, 2020). A heuristic of panopticism could complement these contributions by raising questions about the disciplining effects of observations that are more open regarding their specific purpose.…”

“…The contributions to this thematic issue survey this landscape. Krüger (2020), Hillebrandt (2020), and Kandiko Howson and Buckley (2020) illustrate how increasingly extensive and elaborate data infrastructures are becoming an end in themselves. The contributions by Dix, Kaltenbrunner, Tijdink, Valkenburg, and de Rijcke (2020) and Huber (2020) show how performance-based budgeting and quality assurance schemes direct universities, departments and researchers toward new objectives.…”