Abstract

The chapter presents a comparative analysis of public higher education systems (HES) in Germany and Poland. Instead of limiting our study to macro indicators such as gross expenditure on higher education or R&D as per cent of GDP, we draw on the evidence based on micro data especially collected for this study and concerning individual higher education institutions (HEIs). Comparative analysis is based on a sample of 71 public HEIs (universities and technical universities) from Germany and 34 HEIs from Poland across time period 1995-2008.Throughout the analysis we compare several characteristics concerning educational performance of Polish and German HEIs. First of all we present country level evidence and main differences between systems of higher education in the two countries, Then, we pass towards more detailed description of the performance of academic institutions based on micro level data. We focus on several measures of inputs concerning: students, staff and financial flows. Given at least double mission of HEIs (teaching and research), as outputs we consider: teaching output (measured in terms of graduates), as well as research output, proxied by the number of publications listed in Thomson Reuters' ISI Web of Science database. Finally, we present a comparative case study based on the analysis of two technical universities: RWTH Aachen University from Germany and Silesian University of Technology from Poland.Our exercise suggest that HEIs in Poland and Germany differ a lot, especially in terms of financial resources and research productivity.Detailed analysis of German and Polish HES from the perspective of aggregate and institutional level evidence can have important indications for the policy makers involved in the reform of higher education and research activity in Poland and Germany.

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