Transformations of the Educating Leviathan : The Restructuring of German Higher Education in the Noughties

The German system of higher education has witnessed considerable change in the first decade of the 21st century. Enabled by the 1998 amendment of the German Framework Act for Higher Education, higher education institutions have introduced Bachelor and Master degree programmes which are gradually replacing the traditional academic programmes. In the wake of the introduction of new curricular structures, accreditation agencies were founded for the purpose of "quality assurance" of the new Bachelor and Master programmes. Moreover, after the abolition of the so-called "tuition-fee ban" by the German Federal Constitutional Court in 2005, some German states introduced tuition fees at their public higher education institutions – which, after some time, were disestablished in some states. These are remarkable changes, given that Germany in the mid- and late 1990s was perceived by many observers from the inside and outside as a country of "Reformstau" (reform deadlock). At that time, political scientists, economists, and other social scientists may have classified Germany as a rather unlikely case for the structural reforms of higher education that happened in the following years. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the aforementioned major developments in German higher education from a political science perspective