Traditionally, it is considered that even for students at the bachelor and master levels, it is an advantage to study in research universities, since students would be more directly exposed to novel research results. However, especially at the bachelor level, tertiary education has now become a mass undertaking, which should prepare students to the labor market and transmit standard contents, so this advantage is less obvious. Some scholars argue that research professors are not necessarily good teachers; others that too many students enrolled in research universities impair international competitiveness in research, particularly when comparing with the US.
In this brief, we provide some data from ETER to frame the discussion and to compare the situation between European countries (and the US). First, when looking at the highest degree that higher education institutions are legally allowed to offer, about half of them can offer doctoral degrees (1276 institutions in the 2014 ETER data), most of the remaining offer at least master degrees (964 higher education institutions) and fewer only bachelor degrees (224).
When looking to the number of students, the picture is quite different as many of the non-doctorate awarding higher education institutions are small. On average, 84% of the bachelor students and 88% of the master students are enrolled in institutions that award doctoral degrees. A closer look reveals different national situations (see Figure below). In most European countries, including large countries as UK, Spain, Italy and France, nearly all students are enrolled in doctorate-awarding institutions. However, we can identify a group of countries where between one-third and two-thirds of the bachelor students (and a sizeable share of master students) are enrolled in institutions without doctoral program, like colleges, Polytechnics or Fachhochschulen. The structure of these national systems therefore somewhat resembles the US, where about 2/3 of the undergraduate students study outside the university sector. Such ‘binary’ systems include some of the best European countries in terms of scientific output and innovation, like Germany, Finland, Netherlands and Finland.
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