Higher Education Access for Minorities: Comparing Policies and Politics in the U.S. and Germany


Three Decades of German Commentary on U.S. Higher Education



Jon H. Oberg
This article reviews the past three decades of government efforts to increase higher education access for minorities in the Western industrial world's two largest federal republics. It explores the political climate for providing higher education access as well as the policies themselves. It concludes with a summary of leading Germany commentary on U.S. higher education, some of which represents views not often heard in this country.

"Democratization" of higher education access, to provide equal higher education opportunity for all racial and ethnic minorities, has been a widely-shared political goal for nearly thirty years in the United States. Much progress was made from the 1960s through 1975 but, subsequently, minority enrollment of blacks and Hispanics has declined as a proportion of total enrollment. Despite warnings, primarily from higher education organizations,[1] that the declines represent a waste of potential talent and could lead to heightened racial tensions, the issue of the declines has remained low-key, largely neglected by top U.S. political leaders.

Germany is also dealing with ethnic questions resulting from the influx nearly thirty years ago of Gastarbeiter , guest workers, who came to the Federal Republic to provide an expanded labor force for the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle. The legacy of these years continues to be an explosive element in Germany's overall social policy. Increased immigration, mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of the two Germanies has compounded the problem to the point where violence against the Ausländer, the foreigners, threatens again an oft-torn-and-mended German social fabric. Higher education access for the children of the guest workers and immigrants, however, has not been an important part of this issue's politics in Germany, due to the country's educational structure as well as to neglect from political leaders.

Germany can in no way be a model for the United States, for the German experience is a disheartening one. But this does not mean that a comparative analysis of the policies and politics of higher education access across the two countries holds no lessons. Expert commentary over the past thirty years by Germans over their own problems, and their analyses of the U.S. experience, provides unusual insights, largely "foreign," unfortunately, to the U.S. debate.

This article reviews thirty years of higher education access for minorities in the different policy contexts of the two countries. A striking similarity is the neglect of the issue as a top domestic policy concern. The article attempts to explain some of the reasons for this neglect. Quotations from German-language works cited in the notes have been translated into English by the author of this article.

Germany-USA Similarities
Higher education in the Federal Republic of Germany readily invites comparison with higher education in the United States. Both countries witnessed huge increases in demand for higher education in the 1960s, when elitism gave way to mass higher education forces. Both countries have underserved minority populations; in the Federal Republic the minority is primarily Turkish but, as in the United States, the overall minority participation problem is heterogeneous.

At the institutional level, there is a history of considerable mutual admiration. Many American universities are patterned after the early nineteenth century University of Berlin, as established by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The traditions of internal autonomy, departmental chairs, research for knowledge's sake, and the role of research in teaching owe greatly to this institution.[2] Likewise, "academic freedom" in the U.S. is derived in part from German Lehrfreiheit. [3] Many educators in Germany, particularly over the past thirty years, have tried to emulate certain features of the United States' higher education system. America's diversified system and its model of institutional competition have been popular in German debate even if they have not had much impact in reality.[4] The U.S. comprehensive university with its multiple pathways to educational opportunity has, however, influenced some of the newer German universities.

There is also considerable similarity in governmental structure, in that both countries are federal republics. As in the United States, the German states (Länder), not the central government (Bund), have the basic responsibility for higher education, a responsibility that has been traditional since at least the nineteenth century, although it is not specifically mentioned in the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of 1949,[5] just as higher education is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution of 1787. In 1961, the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) gave its view of the primacy of the Länder regarding cultural affairs, which also applies to higher education and parallels the meaning the the Tenth Amendment in the United States:

According to the basic decision of the Basic Law (Articles 30, 70ff. and 83ff., Basic Law) any cultural affairs that can be administered and controlled by the state are under the jurisdiction of the Länder, unless special regulations of the Basic Law specifically define limitations or exceptions in favor of the Bund. This basic decision of the Constitution--a decision that was made for the benefit of the federalist structure of the state in order to divide authority effectively--prevents us from assuming that cultural matters are within the jurisdiction of the Bund unless an unequivocal regulation to make exceptions exists in the Basic Law.[6]
The German federal constitution also contains clauses dealing with the general social good, as does the U.S. Constitution, and with freedom of choice of occupation. German courts have interpreted these clauses to permit a role for the Bund in higher education. The Bund has, over time, exercised an increasing role in such matters as construction of buildings, financing research, and student aid, like the federal government in the United States. The Federal Republic also has its version of "concurrent" Land and Bund jurisdiction over higher education, although it is more formalized in a constitutional amendment, the "joint responsibility" (Gemeinschaftsaufgaben) amendment.

Germany-USA Differences
The profound differences between the two higher education systems, however, can make the similarities seem superficial. The differences start with the transition from secondary to postsecondary education: in the Federal Republic most students enter a university only after attending a Gymnasium, a selective secondary school which prepares its students for university attendance; in the United States any high school diploma, and sometimes less, qualifies a student for attendance at many higher education institutions. German students completing studies at the Gymnasien and passing the Abitur examination have also studied one or two years longer than U.S. high school students, and have completed a curriculum common to U.S. college freshmen and sophomores. The Abitur therefore corresponds more to the U.S. two-year associate degree than to a U.S. high school diploma. German students entering universities are correspondingly considered to have much of their formal liberal education behind them, and are termed mature (Hochschulreife) and prepared for more specialized study. The Diplom a German university graduate receives after four or more years of study is perhaps closer to the U.S. master's degree than to the U.S. baccalaureate degree, the latter being the rough equivalent of a German Vordiplom. [7] The U.S. master's degree is akin to a Diplom with additional Vertiefungen or Aufbaustudien. Only at the doctoral level is there rough comparability of academic degrees.

In the Federal Republic of Germany higher education access has a different dimension than in the United States. Access decisions come for the most part much earlier in a student's life, due to the tracking or streaming of students at the beginning of the secondary level. German universities are not as much the "screening" mechanisms U.S. colleges and universities are sometimes claimed to be. Although educators in the Federal Republic for the past quarter of a century have attempted to configure universities to provide more pathways to a university degree, many of the access questions still attach at the secondary level and how those institutions connect to tertiary education. The establishment of comprehensive secondary schools (Gesamtschulen) and the removal of barriers for girls to attend Gymnasien have tended to democratize secondary schools in the Federal Republic, but this has left the Hauptschulen no longer the "main schools," but rather in danger of becoming residual schools for minorities.[8]

Minority access to higher education has not been as much of an issue in the Federal Republic as in the United States because of low visibility as the problem developed. In 1970, when concern for minority access was high in the United States, minority children of immigrant workers (Gastarbeiter) in Germany constituted only 1.7 percent of the pupils. In 1973, the Federal Republic put into effect an Ausländerstopp, an attempt to ward off problems by limiting immigration. Not until 1980 did minority enrollment in primary and secondary schools jump to 6.3 percent, of which 58 percent were Turkish.[9] Klaus Hüfner of the Free University of Berlin cites another reason for low visibility:

An analysis of the educational policy reactions during the 1970s led to the conclusion that the political parties as well as the overall educational planning bodies...were extremely reluctant to discuss education problems of the children of migrant workers. This is not surprising: on the one hand, migrant workers do not belong to the voter potential, because they have no right to vote either at the Federal or at the Länder or community level.[10]
The educational planning bodies of the Federal Republic have also not consistently dealt with German minorities. On the one hand, they are to have the same rights as German pupils, but on the other, they are to keep their cultural and mother tongue identity to permit their re-integration into their "countries of origin." With this background, it is understandable why only a quarter of the minority population has received full vocational training or attended schools at the highest secondary level, and why minority access to higher education has not been a high profile problem.[11]

Higher education institutions themselves in the two countries are also much different than they appear at first. In the United States, tuition-charging institutions are more a part of a market economy, owing to the historical importance of private colleges and universities and competition with their public counterparts. Ulrich Karpen, a leading authority on German and U.S. education laws, traces the history:

The German school and university system is essentially state-owned.... In the conflict between freedom and tolerance on the one hand (the "market" model) and the guarantee of justice and equality on the other hand, education and scientific research...became a governmental area of activity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The private school and university system play only a marginal, not a competitive role. There are only a few private, church-operated universities offering specialized studies....
Parallel to the public schools and state or municipally owned universities, the private educational system in the USA plays a much more important role in all areas than it does in Germany. In contrast to Germany, education was viewed up to the recent past as a private matter with the state only gradually entering the picture in an assisting and supporting role.[12]
Even U.S. institutions that tried to copy the Humboldtian ideal did so only in part, and mistakenly at that.

The German model was most self-consciously admired and followed in the United States, with the least Germanic of results. Nothing could be further from the German state-controlled and -financed university than the buccaneering, free-market system of American higher education in the nineteenth century, where any educational entrepreneur could open a college anywhere and teach whatever the student customers were prepared to pay for.... Mistaken or not, the American belief that a college could not be a university unless a considerable part of its resources was devoted to specialized research had an immense impact on American higher education, [but]...[t]he German influence...was the influence of a Germany that never existed except in the minds of its admirers.[13]
Another major difference between German and American institutions is the hierarchical nature and importance of prestige in the American system. In the Federal Republic, all 51 universities are presumed to be equal in status;[14] in the United States, much attention is paid to the various niches institutions find for themselves in competition with each other. In the Federal Republic, a university education itself is a strong determinant of future social and economic status; in the United States, the niche of the institution attended is strongly superimposed over the futures of graduates.

There are also several differences in state and national government roles in Germany as compared to the United States. In the United States, institutions often set their own admissions policies, jealously guarding them against state intrusion even though this has meant difficulty in student transfers among institutions. In Germany, this power has been taken over by the state, as declared by its highest court:

The essential decisions regarding the prerequisites for establishing absolute restrictions on admission and the selection criteria which are to be applied must be made by the legislature itself. The universities can be empowered to regulate the details within defined boundaries.[15]

The reason for this is that unlike in the United States, where higher education is a privilege, in the Federal Republic it is a civil right. Hüfner has contrasted the "free-market" American tendencies with a Western European tradition that "thinks primarily in terms of obligations that compel governments to act positively for the enjoyment of basic rights as laid down in national and international legislations on human rights...."[16] The Federal Republic is a signatory to the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, among other documents and treaties.[17] The view of Federal Republic education policy-makers is that these civil rights extend to higher education:

The educational policy of a democratic society must be based on the principle of the civil right to education. Hence, the reform of higher education must lead to a university structure that gives every citizen the opportunity to obtain an education and an occupation in line with his abilities, regardless of the income and educational background of his parents.[18]

The Bundesverfassungsgericht has likewise interpreted the Grundgesetz to include a basic right to education, and the constitutions of several Länder make education and training up to the level of one's abilities a basic right.[19]

Two immensely important consequences flow from viewing higher education as a civil right in the Federal Republic, as compared to the U.S., where it is not. When the state pays for higher education, institutional budgets are not as likely to rise and fall with demand as when students also must pay. In the United States, where most students pay at least some tuition, the size of the higher education establishment varies--albeit inelastically--with demand. For sundry market related reasons, 144 colleges had to close in the 1970s in the U.S., while 260 new institutions were created.[20] Even at the height of the student enrollment surge in the U.S., places for students remained available. In the Federal Republic, in response to both demographics and reforms toward mass higher education (including reforms at the secondary level), supply has been rationed by a numerus clausus procedure, putting students on waiting lists, beginning in a major way in 1970 and continuing for two decades.

To ensure equality of inopportunity, admissions decisions became more and more centralized in the Federal Republic. In 1972, the Bundesverfassungsgericht cast doubt on the numerus clausus procedure that had been used by the Länder and indicated that waiting lists were constitutional only if all universities were being used to their maximum and if students were given equal choice across the entire nation. The Länder subsequently created a central student placement agency, the Zentralstelle für die Vergabe von Studienplätzen--ZVS, to comply with the court's decision, which removed admissions decisions even further from institutions. Thereupon followed legislative action at the national level to bring all higher education planning of the Länder under a central framework law, the Hochschulrahmengesetz of 1976, under which all Länder had up to three years to comply with the national legislature's plans for Germany's higher education system.

Numerus clausus and the ZVS are still very much a part of the German higher education scene, and they are the most obvious reminder of the differences in the evolution of state and federal powers over higher education access when comparing Germany to the United States. From an American standpoint, Germany seems actually to have more of a unitary government than a federal one with regard to higher education.

In the 1980s, however, there was a modest German retreat from the centralizing tendencies of previous decades. The "competitive model" of university gained popularity as a solution to the perceived mediocrity brought on by mass higher education and increased intervention of the national government.[21] The Framework Act of 1976 was amended in 1985 to give universities somewhat more flexibility in academic matters and to permit more private institutions to be established. A flurry of rank-orderings of departments and institutions appeared. Even the popular press now engages in ranking German universities: mindful of the best-selling rankings of U.S. institutions by the American weekly newsmagazine U.S. News and World Report, the Hamburg-based weekly Der Spiegel began publishing its rankings of German universities in 1990.[22]

Two final differences are of note in comparing the two countries' access approaches: Bund/Länder cooperation in planning and in student aid.

When the Gemeinschaftsaufgaben, or joint responsibility amendment, was passed in 1969, it resulted in structured communication between the national and state levels. The Federal Republic enjoys formal committees such as the Federal-State Commission for Educational Planning (Bund-Länder-Kommission für Bildungsplanung--BLK) and the Planning Committee for Construction in Higher Education (Planungsausschuß für den Hochschulbau--PLA). Such committees have considerable authority but of greater importance, in contrast to the lack of coordination between federal and state levels in the United States, they make it much more likely that both levels of government move together in a coordinated approach.

A most important example of Bund/Länder cooperation is student aid. Under the federal law for furthering education (Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz, or "Bafög"), a combined grant and loan program has been offered to financially needy students with the Bund paying 65 percent of the cost and the Länder paying 35 percent. The aid goes primarily for student subsistence, there being no state institution tuition fees, and is also available to some students at the upper secondary school level. This coordinated approach to financing higher education access contrasts greatly with the uncoordinated and sometimes contradictory student aid experience in the United States.

Coincidentally, the Federal Republic moved with the United States in the 1980s toward more student loans and away from grants. In 1982, the year after U.S. student grant aid peaked and students started to become significantly more dependent on loans, Germany likewise altered course and turned its Bafög aid strictly into loans. Hüfner, writing in 1982, predicted that "many students, especially from the lowest income groups, will be reluctant to assume a long-term debt in order to finance their education, which will negatively influence the proclaimed equality of educational opportunity goal of the 1960s and 1970s."[23] He proved to be a prophet. A report summarizing the findings of the Federal Minister for Education and Science in 1989 showed a decline in lower-income student enrollment:

The share of working class students has appreciably declined since 1982.... [T]he number of students originating from the lower-level working, employee, and service class [declined] in the same amount as the number of students originating from self-employed, higher-level employee, and professional backgrounds rose. From 1982 to 1988 the shift was 6 percent.[24]
This development spurred a shift in German federal policy back toward more emphasis on grants. Dateline Bonn, October 19, 1989:

Six years after deciding to cut the student aid budget, the federal cabinet has given a green light to a student finance improvement: From the autumn of 1990 onward, students should be able to receive up to 890 marks monthly from the State, which they no longer will have to pay back in full, but only in half. In particular, the proposal intends to allow 50 percent of a student's future aid to be considered a non-repayable grant.[25]
There has been no such reversal in the United States despite evidence of similar loan-grant shift effects.[26] But what is of further interest here is the cross-cultural evidence of the importance of grants to those in the lower income levels in society. It is often alleged in the United States that student grants are not as important as (1) low tuition and (2) a prosperous economy, in which students and their families can earn money. In the Federal Republic between 1982 and 1988, however, higher education participation shifted markedly toward the wealthier end of the spectrum in the absence of grants, despite no tuition whatsoever , and arguably the world's premier economic boom . In this there may be a lesson for the United States.

The Political Climate for Higher Education Access in the USA
Higher education in the United States, viewed over two centuries, has seldom been on the front burner politically. The Morrill Act, now among the most celebrated pieces of legislation in any area of endeavor, was never a big political issue and was little noted when it passed Congress. The GI Bills caught the nation's attention only after their passage because they elicited more enrollment in higher education than first imagined. The Higher Education Act of 1965 was overshadowed by the rest of President Johnson's civil rights and Great Society agenda. The "Education Amendments" of 1972, the most ambitious federal higher education measure in history, were noted during their passage more for a controversial busing provision that was attached to them than for the quantum leap they made in higher education policy. Because they were so sweeping and authorized so much new spending, the passage of the amendments actually moved higher education well down on the nation's political agenda for an extended time, making it more difficult to deal with emerging issues like minority enrollment declines. Whatever their educational impact, the amendments virtually destroyed an already low level of political partisanship over higher education.

It was only from 1970 to 1972, leading up to the amendments, that higher education was at the top of the nation's political agenda and stimulated partisan interest. Harvard professor of education (now U. S. Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan has written:

Education? At the top of the agenda of issues that most concern the American public? Well, yes. In these months--two to three years, really--education issues for once had seized the public mind and the subject became political as had scarcely ever been before and has not been since.[27]
It was President Nixon who put higher education in the political spotlight in March, 1970, with these words in a message to Congress:

No qualified student who wants to go to college should be barred by lack of money. That has long been a great American goal: I propose that we achieve it now....
Something is basically unequal about opportunity for higher education when a young person whose family earns more than $15,000 a year is nine times more likely to attend college than a young person whose family earns less than $3,000....
Something is basically wrong with federal policy toward higher education when it has failed to correct this inequity, and when government programs...have largely been disjointed, ill-directed and without a coherent long-range plan.

Republican Nixon was in the mainstream of Republican tradition in calling for far-reaching federal higher education legislation. Congressman (and later Senator) Morrill was a Republican, as was President Lincoln, who signed the Morrill Act. President Grant, a Republican, (unsuccessfully) advocated a constitutional amendment embodying equal educational opportunity for all races. Republican Presidents Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur also (unsuccessfully) advocated a strong federal role in education, including federal financial aid to local institutions. In the twentieth century, conservative Republican Senator Robert A. Taft--often called "Mr. Republican"--explained:

"Education is primarily a state function--but in the field of education...the federal government has a secondary obligation to see there is a basic floor under those essential services for all adults and children in the United States."[28]
Many Democrats, however, were taken aback at Nixon's move. They saw Republican higher education policy as obstructionist, following the colorful description of Republican Senator and 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who said about education, "I fear Washington as much as Moscow."[29] They could not believe Nixon actually proposed to go further in federal efforts to provide higher education opportunity than President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, had gone in his War on Poverty.

Democrats should not have been so surprised. Party platforms, although seldom taken too seriously, hinted at Republican interest in education. Key appointments also transcended party. Nixon's Commissioner of Education in 1970 was Democrat James Allen, to whom Lyndon Johnson had once offered the same position, and the White House advisor behind Nixon's 1970 education moves was Moynihan, also a Democrat.

The first term of the Nixon Administration had an ambitious social agenda, which was not so much to undo the Great Society efforts of the Democratic Johnson Administration as to reshape them into programs Republicans could feel more comfortable with. There was great emphasis on New Federalism, which did not mean backing away from social goals already set out, but a sorting of responsibilities among state, federal, and local sectors of government and the private sector.

The Nixon Administration liked a student aid approach to higher education, similar as it was to the "voucher" concept of giving individuals basic support and letting the free market control choice thereafter, always popular with conservatives.

President Nixon gave Congress his proposed higher education legislation in 1970 and 1971, where the initiatives were received with mixed reaction. Although they were not greatly unlike what Congress would in 1972 eventually pass, many congressmen and -women initially had fundamental problems with them. Institutions had the ears of influential representatives, and a report by Earl Cheit called The New Depression in Higher Education, showing many colleges and universities running budget deficits, created a sense that this was a crisis that could only be relieved with institutional aid.[30] From the standpoint of minority participation in higher education, Nixon's congressional critics also had problems. The Administration proposed a basic grant package of $1400 per student, which would be enough to finance attendance at a community college, but which would create a further incentive for poor and minority students to enroll at those colleges, and result in an even greater stratification of colleges by family income.[31] Other critics felt that middle income students were being left out.

The Senate acted first, in 1971. The leader for the legislation was Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Education and a Democrat. The legislation was not destined to become a partisan issue, for Pell was a strong advocate of equality in educational opportunity through the vehicle of student aid, the same vehicle favored by the Republican Nixon Administration. His bi-partisan cooperation with the subcommittee's ranking minority member, Senator Winston Prouty of Vermont, and with the influential Republican senator Jacob Javits of New York, set a tone that would carry over to create some unlikely bi-partisan alliances in the House of Representatives the following year, and would set a tradition in the Senate for the next two decades.

Democratic Congressman (and later New York University President) John Brademas was among the political detractors of Nixon in the House but liked his education initiatives, including one to raise the importance and visibility of all levels of education at the federal level:

President Richard M. Nixon, in his education message to Congress of March 3, 1970, asked for the establishment of a National Institute of Education. Although I was a Democrat and had been hostile to Nixon since his first campaign for a seat in Congress..., I thought the president's proposal highly constructive and decided to sponsor the bill....[32]
Brademas, a Democratic partisan who served most of the decade as House Democratic Whip, not only championed Nixon's approach to education but even fought against the higher education leadership of Democratic Congresswoman Edith Green, head of the House subcommittee of jurisdiction:

I had, for example, led the opposition to a bill Mrs. Green introduced in early 1969 to cut off all federal aid to colleges that had experienced student unrest. The fight was intense, bitter, and partisan.... The Nixon Administration also opposed the Green bill.[33]
While the Senate witnessed bipartisanship between Senators Pell and Prouty in its higher education subcommittee, Brademas in the House subcommittee counterpart became a higher education ally of Republican Congressman Albert Quie: "Although each of us was at times a vigorous partisan, we both saw mutual advantage in forging bipartisan agreements [in higher education] whenever we could."[34]

The bipartisanship forged in the Congressional debate over the Education Amendments of 1972 carried through the Ford and Carter Administrations and survived the Reagan Administration. Toward the end of the Reagan years, Brademas wrote, "We have seen a...phenomenon as a coalition of Republicans and Democrats in Congress has resoundingly rejected President Reagan's attempts to...dismantle major components of federal education programs."[35] Writing in 1987 for a British readership on the U. S. Congressional approach to higher education, Donald Sharpes observed pointedly, "There are no easy distinctions into conservative/liberal or democratic/republican voting blocs...."[36] As far as higher education is concerned, this almost non-political atmosphere is both a continuation of long-standing tradition and a specific consequence of the bipartisanship exhibited in the passage of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Another reason for surprising political calm in the face of a higher education crisis for minorities is the notable absence of interest groups effectively pushing the political parties to address the issue. This, too, has roots in the Education Amendments of 1972, when key black and Hispanic members of the House Committee on Education and Labor did not see the new grant programs in the bill as a significant, potential help to their minority constituencies. Gladieux and Wolanin have noted that Black Caucus members Augustus Hawkins, William Clay, Shirley Chisholm, and Puerto Rican Herman Badillo "seemed to be acting contrary to the 'objective' interests of their clientele" in supporting aid to institutions over aid to low-income students.[37] While this could be explained by their doubts about the future funding of the grants, they also supported an institutional aid formula that gave comparatively less aid to colleges with large numbers of low-income students. One must ask why, and how this has affected minority interest groups in their efforts with Congress and political parties.

A primary reason for the Black Caucus position in 1971-72 was pressure from historically black colleges, which encouraged a trade-off in general aid formulas for more federal financial help for them, specifically through the so-called Title III Developing Institutions provisions. The lobbying of the black colleges is still effective today, keeping the Title III program, as it has evolved, a focus of higher education for blacks. The black community, long united in favor of racial integration in education at the elementary and secondary levels, has remained cautious about programs that might inadvertently undermine support for the black college tradition. As late as 1960, approximately seventy-five percent of black enrollment was concentrated at these colleges.[38] Many black educators and leaders continue to make the welfare of historically black institutions their top higher education priority, thereby diluting concerns about minority enrollment as a general problem, even though by the late 1980s such institutions accounted for less than one-fourth [39] of all black enrollment.

Another reason the minority enrollment decline did not become a highly visible political issue until recently is that there is a long tradition of trying to solve educational problems through the courts and law enforcement. Blacks achieved their first real civil rights victories in education--including higher education--through the United States judicial system, after the political and legislative systems had failed them. Higher education desegregation victories in the U. S. Supreme court even preceded the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, noted for its desegregation of elementary and secondary education. These struggles continue on, now most notably over desegregation efforts in eighteen states that once had de jure higher education separation, where the states are in various stages of integrating their once separate systems.[40]

The interest groups in the U.S. now most closely associated with the minority enrollment problem, interestingly, are not the traditional minority advocacy groups at all. One researcher has classified such well-know groups as the National Urban League and the A. Phillip Randolph Institute as least active on minority enrollment policy, the most active groups being the associations of higher education institutions, led by the American Council on Education.[41] The latter organizations, however, have traditionally been considered weak in politicizing issues, in part due to their reluctance to organize politically. Their reputation remains damaged by their ineffectiveness in influencing the Education Amendments of 1972.[42] Although the reports and press releases of higher education interest groups create headlines about the deteriorating minority enrollment situation, so far they have been able to do little to transform the issue into a political one that can engage new action in Congress.

The Political Climate for Higher Education Access in the Federal Republic of Germany
There are at least three important differences between higher education politics in the United States and those of the Federal Republic of Germany. One is the nature of political parties. German political parties, like their counterparts in virtually every country with a parliamentary system of government, are more ideological than those in the United States. They are more likely to coalesce around, and be identified with, particular issues, including those in higher education, and to pay more attention to party platforms. The Social Democratic Party, for instance, has been especially associated with the goal of expanding higher education access to the German working class; the Christian Democratic Party with Catholic appointments (church and state are not separated in German higher education as they are in the U.S.); and the Free Democratic Party with Lehrfreiheit. [43] Owing largely to a presidential system of government, political parties in the United States are organized more for purposes of winning elections, and it is not uncommon to have difficulty identifying the parties with the directions of higher education policies. Even when German parties govern in coalition, they often retain more ideological distinctiveness than U.S. political parties.

The politics of "democratization" in German higher education is also substantially different from the United States. The term itself has different emphasis if not meaning in Germany, where it refers more to "the sense of equal representation of the constituent groups on all university bodies;"[44] in the United States "democratization" is more closely associated with minority group enrollment issues and essentially means the same as "equal opportunity." In Germany, equal opportunity is expressed by Chancengleichheit, and has less to do with minorities than with economic class within the dominant culture. The differences are more than semantic. Democratization of university governance has been a much larger political issue in Germany than Chancengleichheit for minorities, and has been an issue at least equal to higher education access for the low-income. In the United States, the democratization of governance in higher education is less a movement than the defusing of a potential movement through occasional placement of students and, even less often, faculty on governing boards.

The latter difference also serves to point out that governance of higher education in the United States is often a private sector matter, and this is reflected in the political climate. Although four out of five students in the U.S. now attend state-owned institutions, private institutions still predominate numerically. Moreover, public institutions in the U.S. guard their autonomy as fiercely as private institutions. In Germany there is a tradition of autonomy (painfully reconstituted after the National Socialist period), but inasmuch as the institutions are virtually all state-owned there has been more direct control, even politicization, of universities by both Land and Bund. State government bureaucracies especially have been more involved in operational details in German higher education than in the United States.[45]

The political climate still dominating higher education in the United States was established largely by two politicians: Lyndon Johnson through the Higher Education Act of 1965, and Richard Nixon through his March, 1970, address to Congress and the subsequent Education Amendments of 1972. In Germany, however, despite the closer structural connections between government, politics, and higher education, the political climate of recent decades was not established by politicians, but ironically by the noticeable lack of political activity at the onset of the mass higher education movement in the early 1960s. It was a philosopher and historian, Georg Picht, who created a lasting stir with a series of magazine articles--soon followed by a book--entitled Die deutsche Bildungskatastrophe. Picht wrote:

The current economic and political leadership, which has made possible the so-called economic miracle, attended school before the First World War. The power of today's economy and society has been shaped in spirit by the schools and universities in the Weimar period. But now such capital has been used up: the Federal Republic stands in comparative school statistics at the lowest end of European countries, next to Yugoslavia, Ireland, and Portugal.... An educational emergency stands before us, the likes of which we are hardly able to imagine.... But the political leadership in West Germany insistently shuts its eyes to this fact and, in musty lethargy or blind complacency, is leaving Germany ever further behind international development in a learning based civilization.... When cultural [educational] policy is debated, the Bundestag is empty.[46]
Picht singled out the political parties for blame. The Social Democratic Party in 1959 had called for a greater effort to avoid "educational underdevelopment,"[47] but when the alleged catastrophe caught the attention of the public, the SPD had no solid program to offer. When serious debate of the issue finally began in the Bundestag, the governing Christian Democratic Union tried to play down the issue though the silence of Chancellor Ludwig Erhard. Picht damned with faint praise the narrow technical changes suggested by the Free Democratic Party.[48]

The political parties that were to govern the Federal Republic over the next decades were forced, from this crisis in the mid-1960s onward, into strategies of reaction to higher education expansion pressures. Elected leaders both at the federal and state levels had little expertise in how to deal with the problem.[49] The continued existence of numerus clausus demonstrates these strategies were not very successful.

The first strategy involved merging various types of higher education institutions into regional comprehensive universities, or Gesamthochschulen, in order to utilize resources better and to make previously described non-university level study more attractive.[50] It was the CDU-SPD governing coalition that offered the 1969 joint responsibility (Gemeinschaftsaufgaben) constitutional amendment to speed up the implementation of this strategy across all states. The 1970 SPD-FDP coalition led by Chancellor Willy Brandt subsequently attempted to emphasize equality of opportunity by easing enrollment restrictions,[51] but the majority of state governments were in the hands of the CDU--still enthusiastic about a structural solution--and access policy devolved upon the courts. Several entirely new Gesamthochschulen were established in the early 1970s, but by the time the federal legislation authorized by the 1969 constitutional amendment to spread the model of the comprehensive university into all states was passed in 1976 (with the blessing of both the CDU and SPD), it was concluded that the structural approach was not the answer, and no further comprehensive institutions were established. Political scientist Wilhelm Hennis wrote in 1982:

No other system of higher education in a major country today stands as helplessly before the "educational explosion".... At present, the political leaders of the Federal Republic are paralysed by the results of their educational policy.... Only today it is slowly being realized that it was a misjudgement to push foward with schemes for a new internal structure of the university. This realisation is dawning, even though the Hochschulrahmengesetz of January 1976 has settled this stucture for the foreseeable future.[52]
A second book in the 1960s also had a strong effect on the higher education political climate in the Federal Republic. Ralf Dahrendorf's Bildung ist Bürgerrecht was the subject of much political debate for a decade after its publication, especially its finding that only about five percent of university students in the Federal Republic were from blue-collar backgrounds.[53] In its wake, the SPD-FDP ruling coalition scored a rare political success in German higher education by passing the Bafög student aid program in 1971 to help the lower-income through a financial approach.[54] As noted above, the effort to push additionally for a civil-rights approach to access succeeded simultaneously in the German courts. In 1978, however, the International Council for Educational Development noted in a pithy comment about numerus clausus that "access to higher education is more assured in systems where it is a privilege, as in the United States, rather than a right, as in Germany,"[55] and political interest in higher education as a civil right, as opposed to an opportunity that must be financed, has subsided.

What has not subsided is the partisan political interest in German higher education governance. The student uprisings in the 1960s over governance issues have had a continuing influence, and have spurred sustained political activity unparalleled in the United States. Political parties slow to react to access issues are much involved in governance issues, and campus-based staff and student political parties are often aligned with national parties. This has resulted in a yet heightened politicization of German higher education that has made the public more mistrustful of universities and made further access reform more difficult.[56]

German Commentary on U.S. Higher Education Access
Over the past three decades, several German experts have tried to analyze U.S. higher education access. In hindsight, some of these analyses were clearly products of their times, sharing American hopes for increasing minority access and attempting to learn lessons that could be applied in Germany.

Erwin Helms studied 1960s higher education reform successes in the United States. He was impressed with the U.S. approach to broadening higher education opportunity:

In view of the current, lively-discussed German question of how limitations on admissions (numerus clausus) can be overcome, the attempt of the Americans to provide the possibility of higher education for all youth is most topical. It appears that the effort of Americans to put equal opportunity into effect is consciously changing the relationship between education and society. They are accepting the obligation of society to take into account the rapid rise of the population, the increasing societal competition from within and without, as well as the demands of disadvantaged minorities, especially those of color. It is becoming just as clear that they are energetically attacking the related difficult problem, namely to realize equal opportunity and quality of higher education simultaneously. They know that one could easily be neglected at the expense of the other, but that it is in the interest of the nation to pursue both goals simultaneously with the same emphasis. How the Americans, with a background of officially encouraging a greater influx into higher education, seek to educate self supporting and responsible students while preventing a deterioration of the curriculum, deserves our full attention.[57]
Helms' admiration was not matched by subsequent experts. In 1978, Hermann Müller-Solger, in a tour of the U.S. arranged by the U.S. Office of Education, took note of affirmative action lawsuits in the U.S. and was troubled by them:

For me one of the striking characteristics of the anti-discrimination debate in the USA is that in the struggle to remove barriers, they simultaneously put up a silence about the 'just' decision of the matter and with it, despite all critical focus, retain an astonishing degree of naïvitÉ. Where is the raceless, genderless, and ageless person who could give up development of a measure of life's possibilities? Historical necessity cannot be defined by the denial of fundamental conditions of life. To the contrary: must there not, therefore, be a right of reverse discrimination?[58
]
 This concern was carried forward by Hellmut Becker, who feared direct applications of U.S. Supreme Court affirmative action decisions by Germany's highest court in Karlsruhe:

The question then, in which form and to which extent a racial point of view is allowed to play a role, is for the time being again being played back in actual practice, after one extreme case is settled and one fundamental question clarified. One can truly conclude that this question of practical application has also placed before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe the particulars of its decisions on educational policy, most directly the question of higher education access. Whether it is well managed in Germany is another question. But the complex decision of the [U.S.] Supreme Court with its multiplicity of arguments should not be unnoticed in Germany. The question of what equal opportunity actually means relative to freedom, the question of how equality and freedom stand in proportion to each other in an insoluable contradiction, which is to be worked out again and again in practice, these questions up to now have only been marginally addressed by our courts. They can be certain that these questions will be coming to them.[59]
They never did, in the same way the Bakke case transformed U.S. higher education access, because of the two countries' different higher education access approaches, as noted above. But the fascination with affirmative action questions remained: In 1982, a commentator writing in the German language praised the U.S. highly for its successes with affirmative action. Judging from today's controversy over affirmative action in U.S. higher education, however, he clearly missed the mark:

Affirmative action has noticeably lessened the inner tension between poor and rich in America. No opposition groups say any more that the American system is not good, no one today wants to change it more or indeed to overthrow it. The Negroes do the detail work; through outstandingly equipped organizations they make use of all the possibilities affirmative action offers them.... The organizationally somewhat awkward Mexikanos (Latinos) are hurrying after the possibilities. One can see in this the greatness of 'capitalistic America', that affirmative action has become there, today, a non-controversial principle. In spite of obvious excesses, no one intends to do away with it. Everyone knows that it strengthens the inner coherence of the nation to an unusual degree--delicately, without provoking.[60]
Of the German commentators who were more on target, Ulrich Teichler saw trouble developing long before U.S. analysts noted a downward trend in minority enrollment. His major work on U.S. access, in 1978, followed up on his research and visits in the United States in 1976 for the International Council on Educational Development.[61] Because of their perspicacity, Teichler's works clearly deserve the most attention.

Although Teichler's knowledge of U.S. higher education may be unsurpassed in Germany, and must compare favorably with U.S. experts themselves, it is tempting to read Teichler strictly as a German commentator, comparing the United States most unfavorably to a superior German tradition at almost every opportunity. This would be a mistake, however, for his criticisms easily stand on their own merits. Moreover, Teichler is no salesman for imposing German ideas on U.S. higher education:

One may lament, in one's country, the elitist arrogance with which many adherents of the traditional system reject any opening-up of the universities.... [T]he weaknesses of a system of higher education which stresses centralized planning are all too evident to allow one to lapse into what I like to call comparative chauvinism.[62]
Rather, Teichler approaches his subject convinced that the value of diversity in U.S. higher education has been seriously oversold. The causes of many U.S. higher education access problems can be traced to an American unwillingness to look on the downside of diversity. Teichler is taken aback time and again by Americans' beliefs that diversity is the answer to equal educational opportunity.

Despite all the criticism of problems in higher education of which I heard while in the U.S., the hope in the societal function of the present diversity of the system is so great that transforming the criticism into far-reaching reform appears to be out of the question. When a conversation partner with misty eyes and a missionary tone of voice thrusts into one's hands Burton Clark's article "The Benefits of Disorder" (1976), and when one experiences the repeated contrast of intelligent criticism and boundless faith in the harmony of the system, then the outside observer cannot help but feel annoyed to discover that sentences such as the following have achieved the status of confessions of faith: "The diversity of American higher education is universally regarded as one of its main sources of strength, reflecting the pluralism in the larger society. A diverse educational system affords students a wider choice, is best able to meet the highly distinct needs of a pluralistic society, and should be most adaptable as these needs change." (Carnegie Foundation 1975, p. 125).

Teichler approaches higher education access in the United States by looking at "admissions"; that is, the procedures leading to access. He looks especially at the widespread testing of students in the United States as part of the admissions process, and concludes that not only is such widespread testing not necessary, it gives a false assurance of fairness and objectivity. He is decidedly not against testing per se, however, and argues for its use in the Federal Republic, where the meaning of the Abitur has grown apart in different regions of the country.

Teichler draws distinctions between admissions practices in "selective" and "open" institutions. He notes that selective colleges and universities routinely admit students based on their wealth, or on the fact that a parent may have attended the institution, or on the anticipated contributions the students may make to the institution through, for example, athletics, or even for the reason of having some less academically talented students around so that students who are used to being at the top academically in high school do not find themselves at the bottom and become discouraged. He also notes that selective institutions have often added points to mathematics test scores for women, to make up for differential role expectations they have endured, and have different standards for minorities who come from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds.

The selective colleges and universities are excused by Teichler for departing from a meritocratic standard; he expresses understanding for their having to operate as they do and notes their "positive discrimination." Although he states, "Probably in no other highly industrialized country are the privileged so blatantly favored in admission to higher education as in the U.S.," he suggests that positive discrimination for the disadvantaged may be "more easily accepted when the privileged also receive positive discrimination in the selection process."[63]

It is for "open admission" institutions that Teichler reserves his greater criticism. He sees the U.S. focusing its attention on selective institutions' admissions procedures as if they were the only ones in question. Teichler is much more disturbed by the procedures at non-selective institutions. He finds it

hard to understand why the discussion on admissions criteria and practices in the U.S. focuses to such a small extent on the open admissions sector. The problems of highly selective institutions are treated intensively, although one can assume that many of the alternatives generally discussed in this context would have a negligible effect on the system of higher education as a whole. On the other hand, problems of admission at open admissions institutions are scarcely discussed although they quite clearly have far-reaching effects.[64]
The fundamental problem Teichler sees is that most students do not understand what their choice of institution superimposes over their chances for success in college and in later life.

The majority of high school graduates and other applicants appear to have only a vague picture of the 'quality' of the diverse institutions of higher education. Moreover, it is my impression that the final credentials a person achieves are predetermined upon entrance to a particular college to a greater degree than one might be led to expect from the formal opportunities for transfer and reentry and compensatory study programs.... [H]opes that the disadvantages accrued by attendance at a particular college can be compensated by later job advancement are clearly exaggerated....[65]

This troubles Teichler greatly, for he sees "that the education system in the U.S. is assigned the task of correcting social injustices on a large-scale basis, more so than in many other countries...." A "propagandistic vocabulary" stands in the way of understanding what open admissions in the U.S. is all about, he believes, and "the majority of universities appear to have a vested interest in maintaining such a distorted view among applicants while attempting to assure themselves a sufficient number of well-qualified applicants." Admissions officers are forced to "suspend their professional ethics," he says, and this can result in a limiting of opportunity, rather than an expansion of it. "One has the impression that many potential college applicants in the U.S. are only vaguely informed and are also systematically encouraged to underestimate the hierarchy that exists among the institutions of higher learning."[66]

It is a lack of success in helping society's disadvantaged that has turned the American public away from higher education as a means of creating a more egalitarian and just society, Teichler believes:

At the beginning of the seventies it appears that there was a general acceptance that growing attention should be directed towards easing access to higher education for those groups which were underrepresented in college--or, at least, for those disadvantaged individuals for whom a successful course of studies was anticipated.... [E]fforts towards easing access to higher education were hardly contested during the early seventies, but subsequently they have become more controversial.[67]
One reason for this is that the "special programs for socially disadvantaged students at the colleges have generally not brought the success originally expected." Teichler cites a publicized case of a four-year college graduate "who lost his job a number of times because he could barely read and write," and connects such examples to a decline in popularity in the political sphere for efforts on behalf of socially disadvantaged persons. Colleges were too ready to abandon standards, Teichler believes, in the name of a diversified higher education system in which the mere existence of a program or practice was a demonstration of its need by students. He cites a quotation by former U.S. Commissioner of Education Ernest Boyer ("equality of institutions...means for the students inequality of opportunity") as evidence of this devotion to diversity. He believes it is "the representatives of higher education with their overuse of the 'diversity' slogan who have contributed most to the sharp change in public opinion on open admissions."[68]

What Teichler sees as necessary is the opening up of the selective sector to more students, including disadvantaged minorities. To him,

many low-prestige colleges are so overburdened with problems that they are less in a position to promote each student's individual abilities than are the more prestigious universities.... [T]he lower a college's ranking, the less likely it is that the beginning student will ever complete his education."[69]
In the fall of 1987, several higher education experts from the Federal Republic traveled the United States under the auspices of the bi-national Fulbright Commission. They reported their findings in Neue Entwicklungen im Hochschulwesen der USA, published in 1988. Although most of the report was devoted to other subjects, they did not fail to note the explosive character of the growing under-representation of minorities:

The sharp increase of the so-called 'ethnic minorities', such as Blacks, Asians, and 'Hispanics', constitutes a very important demographic problem. According to a recent projection, after the turn of the century these minorities will constitute majorities in the five southwest states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California. These population groups up to now--with the exception of the Asians--are underrepresented in higher education. This is especially true for the 'Hispanics'. It is feared that the overall educational level in these states will deteriorate if there is not success in admitting more minority group members to higher education studies. Their attendance rate should also be raised, because otherwise the goal of social justice cannot be reached; also feared is a negative influence on economic growth if minority group members do not decide to pursue higher education to a greater extent. An increasing problem is that the underrepresented minority share of enrollment has an above average drop-out rate. Minority group members are being strongly encouraged to prepare themselves better for their studies in high school. Also being attempted is the raising of the share of minority teaching personnel at all levels in the education establishment. To all appearances, what is being dealt with here is a question of considerable political and social dynamite. [70]

What the visiting scholars went on to say, however, could apply to all attempts to compare issues cross-culturally:

Actually, on this side of the Atlantic it is hardly possible to pass a valid judgment on the condition and current development of higher education systems in the USA. Sporadic visits, intensive study of the literature, and lengthy personal stays "on the scene" enable at best only a quick grasp at the details, sectors, and the 'special cases' of the diversified system.[71]
But the authors are too modest. There is much to be learned from comparative studies, if only how issues are perceived by people from other countries. The German critics of U.S. higher education access policies and politics, as well as German admirers, deserve to be read, either for the first time through new translations, or simply because there is an enduring quality to the analysis.

Conclusion
Although there are profound differences in the two countries' approaches to increasing higher education access for minorities, in both the U.S. and Germany the issue is relegated to second-echelon status. One major reason for this, obvious from the discussions above, is that the issue is customarily dealt with in complicated contexts of overall higher education policy; another reason is that in neither country is the issue championed by a particular political party, and in neither country is there substantial interest-group pressure on political parties to compel them to become more involved.

Although there is some cross-cultural dialogue among academics, the deep differences in basic approach to minority access have been a barrier to profitable exchanges of ideas. This is unfortunate, for the differences lead to unusual and (sometimes) insightful perspectives. Both countries would stand to benefit from a new round of mutual analysis and criticism of minority access problems.

Notes

[1] See, for example, Commission on Minority Participation in Education and American Life, One-third of a Nation (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1988), and American Association of State Colleges and Universities, Minorities in Public Higher Education: At a Turning Point (Washington, D.C: AASCU Press, 1988).

[2] Hansgert Peisert and Gerhild Framhein, Systems of Higher Education: Federal Republic of Germany (New York: International Council for Educational Development, 1978), 3.

[3] Harold Perkin, "The Historical Perspective," in Perspectives on Higher Education, ed. Burton R. Clark (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 34.

[4] Ulrich Teichler, Changing Patterns of the Higher Education System: The Experience of Three Decades (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1988), 51, 89.

[5] Ulrich Karpen, "Constitutional Problems Concerning Admission to Institutions of Higher Education--Questions Relevant to a German-American Comparison," International Review of Education XXIV (1978), 8.

[6] Peisert and Framhein, 38, quoting Television Verdict of February 28, 1961.

[7] Karpen, 13.

[8] Klaus Hüfner, "The Right To Education: The Case of the Federal Republic of Germany," International Perspectives on Affirmative Action, A Bellagio Conference, August 16-20, 1982 (New York: The Rockefeller Foundation, 1984), 196, 200.

[9] Ibid, 186, 191.

[10] Ibid, 192-193.

[11] Ibid, 192, 194.

[12] Karpen, 5-7.

[13] Perkin, 37-39.

[14] Peisert and Framhein, 92.

[15] German Federal Constitutional Court, 33, 303, guiding principle 4, pp. 357-358, cited by Karpen, 9.

[16] Ibid, 176.

[17] Ibid, 181-183.

[18] Conference of Ministers of Culture, Kulturpolitik der Länder 1975 und 1976 (Bonn: 1977), quoted by Peisert and Framhein, 4, emphasis added.

[19] Hüfner, 180.

[20] Gareth Williams, "The Economic Approach," in Systems of Higher Education: Eight Disciplinary and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Burton R. Clark (Los Angeles: The University of California, Los Angeles, 1982), 95.

[21] Teichler, 88-89.

[22] The Spiegel results were surprising, in that several of the famous, old German universities came out near the bottom, and the new Gesamthochschulen, or comprehensive universities, judged by many educators and politicians to be failures because they did not lead to emulation as predicted, ranked high.

[24] Hüfner, 197-198.

[25] "Sparpolitik traf Arbeiterkinder" [Budget Policy Hit Working-Class Children] , FU-info (Berlin), December 15, 1989, 9.

[26] "Bundesregierung verbessert Bafög" [Federal Government Improves Bafög Student Aid Program] , Berliner Morgenpost, October 19, 1989, 17.

[26] Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Student Loans: Are They Overburdening a Generation? report prepared by Janet S. Hansen in cooperation with The College Board (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986), i-ii.

[27] Daniel P. Moynihan, foreword to Chester E Finn, Jr., Education and the Presidency (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1977), x.

[28] Eugene Eidenberg and Roy D. Morey, An Act of Congress (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1969), 13.

[29] Ibid., 11.

[30] "Education Report: Pending Bill Could Revolutionize Federal Programs for Higher Education," National Journal 1 (1972): 476.

[31] Gladieux and Wolanin, 73.

[32] John Brademas, The Politics of Education (Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 18.

[33] Ibid., 29.

[34] Ibid., 33.

[35] Ibid., 50.

[36] Sharpes, 107.

[37] Gladieux and Wolanin, 144.

[38] John B. Williams, "The State Role in Achieving Equality of Higher Education," in Toward Black Undergraduate Student Equality in American Higher Education, ed. Michael T. Nettles (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 149.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Black enrollment as a law enforcement issue often overwhelms the issue's financial access aspects. In Michael Nettles' 1988 compilation of perspectives on black enrollment, Toward Black Undergraduate Student Equality in American Higher Education, state and federal roles are relegated almost entirely to law enforcement.

[41] Reginald Wilson, "The Role of Private Interest Groups," in Toward Black Undergraduate Student Equality, 181, 184.

[42] Edward R. Hines and Leif S. Hartnack, Politics of Higher Education, AAHE-ERIC Higher Education Research Report No. 7 (Washington, D.C.: AAHE, 1980), 9.

[43] Wilhelm Hennis, "Germany: legislators and the universities," Hans Daalder and Edward Shils, Universities, Politicians and Bureaucrats (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 6.

[44] Ibid., 1.

[45] "The politicization of the German universities stems from their very origins as institutions of the states." John Van de Graaff, "The Federal Republic of Germany," in Academic Power , ed. John Van De Graaff, et. al. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978), 17.

[46] Georg Picht, Die deutsche Bildungskatastrophe [The German Education Catastrophe] (Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1964), 16-17.

[47] Ulrich Teichler and Bikas C. Sanyal, Higher education and the labour market in the Federal Republic of Germany (Paris: The Unesco Press, 1982), 54.

[48] Picht, 88-97.

[49] Hennis, 4.

[50] Teichler, Changing Patterns of the Higher Education System , 39.

[51] Teichler and Sanyal, 62.

[52] Hennis, 25.

[53] Teichler and Sanyal, 56; Ralf Dahrendorf, Bildung ist Bürgerrecht. Plädoyer für eine active Bildungspolitik [Education is a Civil Right. Plea for an Active Education Policy] , (Hamburg: Nannen Verlag, 1965.)

[54] Klaus Hofemann, Ziel- und Erfolgsanalyse sozialer Reformprogramme am Beispiel des Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetzes [Goal and Success Analysis of Social Reform Programs with the Example of the Federal Education Support Law] , (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain, 1977), 1.

[55] International Council for Educational Development, Access to Higher Education: Two Perspectives (New York: ICED, 1978), 30.

[56] Teichler and Sanyal, 70; Hennis, 27.

[57] Erwin Helms, Die Hochschulreform in den USA und ihre Bedeutung für die BRD. Qualität und Chancengleichheit als Problem der industriellen Gesellshaft. [The Reform of Higher Education in the USA and its Meaning for the FRG. Quality and Equal Opportunity as a Problem of Industrial Society] , (Hannover: Hermann Schroedel Verlag KG, 1971), 7-8.

[58] Hermann Müller-Solger, Amerikanische Hochschulen im Wandel [American Higher Education Institutions in Change] , (Bonn: Der Bundesminister für Bildung und Wissenschaft, 1979), 74.

[59] Hellmut Becker, "Wer darf in den USA studiern?" [Who is allowed to study in the USA?] , Recht der Jugend und des Bildungswesens (1978): 449.

[60] Gyula DÉcsy, Die deutsche Universität im Schnittpunkt amerikanischer und sozialistischer Organisationsprinzipien 1965-1980 (Bloomington, Indiana: European Research Association, 1982), 137-138.

[61] Ulrich Teichler, Admission to Higher Education in the United States, a German Critique (New York: International Council for Educational Development, 1978).

[62] Ibid., 121, 125.

[63] Ibid., 9, 31-35.

[64] Ibid., 119.

[65] Ibid., 13-14.

[66] Ibid., 5, 13, 101, 106, 113.

[67] Ibid., 83.

[68] Ibid., 84, 85, 102, 124.

[69] Ibid., 99, 123.

[70] Thomas R. Hummel, ed., Neue Entwicklungen im Hochschulwesen der USA [New Developments in the Higher Education System of the USA] , (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1988), 7-8, emphasis added.

[71] Ibid., 32.