Expenditure and Financing of Universities in International Comparison

Based on European Tertiary Education Register (ETER) data as well as supplementary own research, the study analyses the funding and expenditures of universities. Austrian universities are on average in the lower midfield of a broad comparison group of European countries ("strong" and "leading" innovation countries according to the European Innovation Scoreboard), but significantly below the average of Switzerland and the leading innovation countries of the EU. At the level of individual universities, the differences are even higher: in a detailed analysis of selected universities, which attempts to make expenditures as comparable as possible, only the University of Uppsala is behind a statistical full university in Vienna, formed by the University of Vienna, the Medical University of Vienna and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. The expenditure differences of the full university of Vienna compared to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich are about 22 percent, the University of Helsinki 31 percent and the University of Zurich 122 percent. The technical universities ETH Zurich and Imperial College London have about three times the budget of the Vienna University of Technology, while the Technical University of Munich has +28 percent.