In 2022, German universities received a total of around €26.7 billion in basic funding, €3 billion more than in 2019 – an increase of 12.9 percent. A total of €10.4 billion in third-party funding was allocated to universities in 2022, an increase of €1.7 billion or 19.1 percent compared to 2019. For the first time in almost ten years, third-party university funding had again increased more significantly than basic funding, and that the so-called third-party funding rate had risen from 26.9 to 28 percent.
Further increase in federal government share of third-party funding, while industry share decreases once again
In addition to the shifts in basic and third-party funding, the new Funding Atlas also shows changes in the sources of third-party funding. Here, the federal government has continued to significantly increase its third-party funding activities. With a share of 31.4 percent, the federal government was the largest source of third-party funding for the first time in 2022; the figure was 29 percent in 2019. The share of funding provided by the DFG was 30.3 percent in 2022, compared to 31.5 percent three years earlier.
The share of industry in the financing of universities continued to see a significant decline: the figure here was only 14.7 per cent in 2022. By way of comparison: in 2019, universities received 17.4 percent from industry, while in 2006 the figure was as high as 26 percent.
Focus on international cooperation
Another focus of the latest Funding Atlas is the internationalisation of publicly funded research. At the presentation, the President of the DFG, Professor Dr. Katja Becker summarised the development of international cooperation as follows:
“More than in previous years, there is an ambivalent development to be seen here. A clear picture emerges of the international competitiveness and appeal of German universities, but there is also an indication of how much science and research are now linked to political events and other global challenges, with some instances of productive cooperation being affected as a result.”
International competitiveness was reflected in the leading role of German universities in Horizon Europe, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2021/22 with over €4 billion in funding, ahead of France with €2.8 billion and Spain with €2.7 billion) and the funding provided by the European Research Council (515 funding recipients – ahead of France with 308 and the Netherlands with 254 funding recipients). Further examples are the high international share of planned collaborations in funding proposals submitted to the DFG (around 20 percent) and the researchers involved in large-scale research collaborations such as Research Training Groups, Collaborative Research Centres and Clusters of Excellence who were previously working abroad and then came to Germany (also around 20 percent).
There is evidence that international scientific cooperation is increasingly affected by political or other global challenges, such as when the United Kingdom initially dropped out of EU research funding altogether after Brexit, having previously ranked second after Germany. Due to China’s strict isolationist policy in the coronavirus pandemic, there was a considerable drop in the number of planned Sino-German collaborations in DFG projects, while planned collaborations with Russia came to a complete halt due to the DFG’s freeze on cooperation after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Funding Atlas as a service
The new Funding Atlas also contains numerous funding ranking lists that show DFG funding approvals by university, subject, region and federal states. In addition to the publication the Funding Atlas website, which has been thoroughly revised, provides extensive information (only in German). The website now makes it even easier for users to find detailed descriptions and key figures for individual universities and research institutions. Improved and additional search functions now also mean that keywords can be used to display all the relevant data at a glance. All tables and figures are interactive, so they can be used for a specific purpose as required.
In addition to the German edition, an English-language summary is to be published in the first half of 2025.
Further Reading
- DFG (25.11.2024): DFG Presents “Funding Atlas 2024”: Key Figures as a Source of Science Policy Information and a Decision-Making Aid
- DFG: Funding Atlas 2024 (German edition)
