German excellence strategy ‘risks creating closed social elite’

Always a difficult question: surely it is better to improve access to 'elite' institutions than to obliterate them. In trying to improve equality of opportunity, take care to build up rather than to drag down...

"...fears that the country’s excellence strategy could lead to a concentration of power in the hands of graduates of a select few institutions, replicating the dominance of the Ivy League in the US or the grandes écoles in France." The above is the (implicit) purpose and aim of the "excellence" strategy in German HE. It will be good for a few individual institutions, academics (especially senior ones) and the educational bureaucracy but detrimental not only to many students but also the entire university system and eventually the German society and economy. The neoliberal ideology (with its competitive and market logic) and transatlantic blinkers (a preference for the US economic model/cultural hegemony; I doubt the excellence strategy has much to do with France and its grandes écoles) are still very strong in Germany it seems. In HE this is an historic irony because it used to be the other way round (the US looking to the German HE system for inspiration).

Barking up the wrong tree? Elitism is inevitable; it's what we do with it that matters. Confucius' core idea was that the gifted among us must devote themselves to serving the rest of us. That's why the IQ threshold for admission to the Chinese bureaucracy has been stuck at 140 for 2,000 years. That's why China is eating our lunch.

In the UK, the situation could be improved by Oxford and Cambridge stopping to take undergrad students entirely, and only focus on research and graduate students