The Excellence Initiative was the largest competitive funding procedure to create German world-class universities and overcome the traditional Humboldtian homogenization of German higher education. This paper examines whether the Excellence Initiative has spurred financial inequality in the national higher education sector. For a period of 15 years, we analyze the third-party funding success of 78 universities that were either winning or losing in the competition. We find that the Excellence Initiative augmented pre-existing differences in third-party funding across institutions. However, this is a one-off level effect that does not initiate a further self-reinforcing divergence process as would be suggested by Matthew effects.

该卓越计划是最大的竞争力资金的程序创建的德国世界一流大学和德国克服高等教育的传统洪堡同质化。本文研究了“卓越计划”是否刺激了国家高等教育部门的财政不平等。在15年的时间里，我们分析了78家在竞争中成败的大学在第三方资助方面取得的成功。我们发现，卓越计划扩大了跨机构的第三方资金的既有差异。但是，这是一次性的效应，不会像马修效应所建议的那样引发进一步的自我强化分歧过程。