From mortality to organizational adaptability – understanding the volatility in the private higher education sector in Germany

In Germany the recognition of private higher education institutions by state accreditation was introduced during the 1980s in order to initiate impulses for the state higher education systems through a higher level of the market reactivity of private actors – organizationswise, scientific or application-related (BMBW 1986; Thieme, 1988). Only after wide sweeping organizational and educational reforms in the late 1990s under the two key terms of competition and differentiation have reactivity and adaptability become veritable goals for all of higher education in Germany (KMK 2005; Krücken, 2017; Mitterle & Stock, 2021). The vast expansion in student numbers of the state accredited private higher education system thereafter is directly related to its capacity to provide more, different or better higher education (Mitterle, 2017). Despite this success in numbers, the expansion is accompanied by high volatility and mortality rate of private institutions. Each year new private higher education institutions search accreditation and old ones close. Beyond financial issue so far no formal organizational explanations exist (Lenhard et al., 2012). While universities have a reputation as enduring institutions (Meier & Krücken, 2006), the volatility creates problems for individual organizations and the sector as a whole: students fear for their degrees and it becomes difficult to persuade future students to pay for degrees in a tuition-free-system if their institutions might not persevere. At closer look however, most private HEI continue to exist in a different form after their closure. They are taken over, merge, change place or organizational form. The close look thus exemplifies a form of adaptability to changing environmental conditions that is rare for higher education and directed at anticipating future conditions for their operations. The paper outlines a framework for investigating organizational adaptability in higher education and provides first results, building on historical data and reconstructive online network analysis of the state accredited private higher education sector in Germany collected for the BMBF-funded research project M-transform.