422 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
tions of mass higher education as the educational system had expanded.
In this sense, the Bologna reforms presented a new European argument
in favor of an old solution for an even older problem.
The nature of university study was supposed to change in fundamental
ways as the result of this process. But, as of the late 1990s, the German
universities found themselves facing an even more extensive transfor-
mation process that fed into a deeper caesura marked by a plethora of
changes that can only be touched upon briefl y here.^127 For one thing, the
university admissions process was changed, putting the selection and
admission of applicants primarily in the hands of the university itself.
The universities also became more responsible for their own manage-
ment: the position of the presidents or rectors was strengthened while
the self-administrating bodies lost power, and new “university councils,”
comprised of external members, were created as supervisory boards. As
part of the reform of German federalism, the federal government was
pushed out of its role in fi nancing the building of the universities and
legislating the higher education system.^128 The Excellence Initiative that
was started by the federal and state governments in 2005 paved the way
for state-regulated competition among the universities to achieve elite
status, which would then entitle them to additional funds as a reward for
top university research. Autonomy, competition, and diff erentiation have
thus become the new lodestars of Germany’s university policy fi rmament.
Internationalization: PISA and Its Consequences
The media attention that surrounded the “PISA Shock” at the beginning
of the twenty-fi rst century resembled the Sputnik shock of 1957 and
the West German debates over the “education catastrophe” in the mid-
1960s. In the PISA report, which compared the performance of pupils
in thirty-one OECD countries, Germany came in at twenty-fi rst place in
reading skills, and it was also in the lowest third for mathematics and
natural sciences.^129 The sociologist Wolf Lepenies commented on the
PISA results in the Süddeutsche Zeitung rather ironically: “It’s a shame
that the GDR no longer exists. If it did, it would have scored better than
the Federal Republic in the school test for the OECD countries called the
PISA study.”^130 The results of the supplemental PISA studies comparing
the states within Germany detected a considerable gap in performance
between the diff erent states, and especially between north and south.
Saxony and Thuringia did relatively well in comparison, but the rest of
the former Eastern states performed poorly.^131 In addition to demonstrat-
ing the low average skill levels of pupils, the PISA study also brought to