Studienplatzvergabe und Kapazitätsermittlung – Berechnungs- und Verteilungslogiken sowie föderale Unterschiede im Kontext der Studienstrukturreform

The article provides an overview and discussion of study place allocation systems and student capacity calculation in German higher education. It furthermore presents data from a survey on student capacity calculations among higher education leaders and the State ministries responsible for higher education. Triggered by the introduction of Bachelor- and Master-degrees, the so called »Bologna reforms«, the calculation of student capacity has been distributed from interstate decision level to state competency in 2006. Individual states have thereby received more creative leeway in calculating the teaching load for degree programs with local entry barriers. Other than applications procedures and entry barriers that are installed on interstate level, local entry barriers may be installed by universities if a normed teaching load per student and regular study time, the Curricular norm value (CNW), exceeds the faculty's capacity. Nine of sixteen German states have now used their leeway to abolish the somewhat modified but old norm values that have fixed these teaching load per student by discipline independent of local conditions and introduced values for individual degree programs. For the new values, calculations are now based on more realistic teaching loads per student and local faculty capacity and can be designed by the individual state or even university rather than normed values that have been settled through interstate agreement. These developments are indeed astonishing as interstate negations have so far struggled to change the curricular norm values even to a minor degree for individual disciplines.