ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the rich social-scientific tradition to throw light on, first, the ideas and institutions that shaped the higher education system in the German-speaking countries and gave it its distinct and for a time highly influential character and, second, the dilemmas that the system currently faces in the light of the emergence of higher education as an international system under for the moment Anglo-American hegemony. The chapter examines the Prussian-German model as the expression of an idea, or rather a consistent set of ideas, namely those associated above all with one name, that of Wilhelm von Humboldt. It also examines two post-Second World War waves of reform: attempts, in the 1970s, to expand the German and Austrian higher education systems and make them more meritocratic; and more recent responses of governments, universities and stakeholders to increasing pressures from an international system now influenced by New Public Management (NPM) and seemingly at odds with the inherited Humboldtian ideal.
