In the CHE Ranking 2020, the assessments of Master’s students in the subjects of Business Administration, Economic Sciences, Industrial Engineering and Business Informatics, and Economics are now online. Besides providing facts about the programmes offered, the ranking provides orientation and an overview of study conditions on Master’s programmes in these subjects at both universities and universities of applied sciences.
Depending on the subject, up to 13 different criteria are considered in the new comparison of Master’s programmes, a selection of which are published in the ZEIT Campus magazine. Master’s students evaluated criteria such as the “overall study situation”, “courses offered” and “research orientation”, and hence the extent to which the degree programme gives students the opportunity to expand on their scientific work and come into contact with important and innovative research results.
In addition, there are facts on research performance such as “third-party funding per academic” and the number of “publications per professor” and “doctorates per professor”. For the subjects of Industrial Engineering and Business Informatics, readers can also find out the extent of the “international orientation of teaching”; for Business Administration at universities of applied sciences, details are provided on the intensity of “contact to work environment”.
Results for selected criteria in the individual subjects:
Business Administration at universities: With around 2,500 Master’s students, the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has the largest Business Administration department of any university in Germany. Students and departments have ranked TUM in the top group for four criteria, alongside LMU Munich, the University of Mannheim and the Finance and Information Management (FIM) programme, which is offered by an alliance of universities. The criteria are as follows: overall study situation, research orientation, doctorates per professor, and publications per professor. ESCP Europe Berlin, Ingolstadt School of Management (WFI) of the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Kühne Logistics University in Hamburg and WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management in Vallendar get very good ratings for the overall study situation and for research orientation.
Business Administration at universities of applied sciences: Of the more than 100 HEIs listed in this subject, a large number of universities located in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria get top marks for student satisfaction with the general study situation. Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences and Munich Business School are ranked in the top group for four criteria: contact to work environment; international orientation of teaching; courses offered; and overall study situation. Nuertingen-Geislingen University and TH Mittelhessen University of Applied Sciences also get very good ratings for the general study situation and their range of courses, and do very well in the “contact to work environment” category, too.
Business Sciences at universities: Bochum University, Witten/Herdecke University and Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen fall into the top group in the “overall study situation” category, and also get very good ratings for the research orientation of their programmes. Witten/Herdecke University is also in the top group in terms of the number of doctorates per professor and third-party funding per academic.
Industrial Engineering at universities: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Hamburg University of Technology and Ilmenau University of Technology receive very good ratings for the overall study situation as well as the research orientation category. Hamburg University of Technology is also among the top group when it comes to the international orientation of its teaching.
Business Informatics at universities: The University of Bamberg is rated very highly in the following four categories: “overall study situation”, “research orientation”, “publications per professor” and “international orientation of teaching”, occupying the top group each time. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Augsburg University and the University of Duisburg-Essen also get good ratings for the overall study situation and for research orientation in the Master’s programmes. In fact, the University of Duisburg-Essen is also rated very highly in terms of the “international orientation of teaching”, another indicator of research performance. KIT and TUM are also in the top group in the category for the number of publications per professor, alongside the universities of Würzburg, Cologne, Paderborn and Siegen.
Economics: Students from the universities of Paderborn, Passau, Trier and Tübingen are very satisfied with their general study situation. In terms of the research criteria “publications per professor” and “doctorates per professor”, LMU Munich and Göttingen University are rated very highly.
The ranking is now available on ZEIT Campus ONLINE at www.zeit.de/masterranking.
Surveys within the CHE Ranking during the coronavirus pandemic
To assure the quality of the CHE Ranking, the plausibility and quality of the data used are checked on a regular basis. An integral part of this quality assurance procedure is reviewing the data generated from the individual surveys and interviews. In order to ensure the plausibility of the results of the survey of Master’s students conducted during the coronavirus pandemic, CHE undertook a variety of background analyses and evaluations. From 20 April 2020 onwards, students were asked additional questions about how their HEI is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and about online teaching. The results were published in the run-up to the publication of the ranking of Master’s programmes in “CHECK – Wirtschaftsstudiengänge: Studienbedingungen an deutschen Hochschulen während der Corona-Pandemie” (CHECK – business courses: study conditions at German higher education institutions during the coronavirus pandemic). They showed that, overall, the Master’s students rated the measures taken by their HEI very positively. Since the HEIs were given the option of determining the start of the survey themselves, an additional analysis was conducted to determine whether the chosen survey period had a systematic effect on the Master’s students’ assessments or the performance of departments in the ranking. No systematic effect was determined that could be attributed to the survey period.