Doomed to Survive? A Longitudinal Analysis of Graduate Schools at German Universities (1990-2025).

Invented in the 1990s as a model for reforming doctoral education, the implementation of graduate schools in German higher education gained momentum in the mid-2000s when they were funded by the Excellence Initiative, a competitive funding scheme for public universities. Graduate schools expanded heavily across the university sector, many of them seeking excellence funding. Though a lot of the proposed schools failed to achieve this goal, they were founded and maintained anyway. Likewise, when excellence funding was terminated in 2018, the schools were not closed. Instead, they adapted to the new situation by sticking to legitimate organizational structures. Graduate schools morphed into specific doctoral programs of research clusters, umbrella structures of universities or faculties, or became part of universities’ excellence strategies. Today, every German university has at least one graduate school or comparable program. This paper is a follow-up analysis of a survey of graduate schools at German universities in 2014. The survey yielded altogether 516 doctoral programs at German universities plus 45 Graduate Schools of Excellence. The paper will inquire into the fate of these schools and thereby explore how these schools managed to survive in times of constrained resources and contested legitimacy. It will relate the findings to research on universities’ actorhood: graduate schools can be seen as a means for navigating between political demands and organizational purposes. In the course of such processes, function and shape of the schools change, allowing them (and their host organizational structures, the universities) to continue an existence that may never have been doomed at all.