Is The Humboldtian University Model An Engine Of Local Development? New Empirical Evidence From The ETER Database

Introduction The higher education system, in advanced countries, has reached the point of massification (i.e. enrolment rates exceeding 50% of the relevant age cohort), while the public budget has not grown correspondingly. Universities are put under pressure to use existing resources, namely staff and funding, in the most efficient way. At the same time there is an increased pressure from the research side: the expectations of society and policy makers on the contribution of research to societal problems have grown significantly, there are new entrants in scientific arena (particularly from Asia) and the competition for funding has increased sharply. This situation creates a classical issue in public policy: we have two valuable goals (serving better mass educational needs and producing good research) between which there is tension or trade-off. Do universities benefit from having inputs (staff and funding) that can produce jointly teaching and research, or there are efficiency-enhancing specialization effects that suggest to keep these activities under separate institutions? What is the impact of the environmental context of the universities? We focus here on the complementarity between teaching and research, which is at the core of the Humboldtian model of university (Schimank & Winnes, 2000). Is the traditional Humboldtian model of university, in which teaching and research are produced jointly by the same academic staff able to foster the economic development of the area in which the university is located? What are the main contextual factors which affect the performance of the European Humboldtian universities?