Germany Expands Its Group of "Elite Universities". (June 18, 2012)

Berlin announced last Friday that five additional universities were to share in the  €2.4 billion Excellence Initiative first announced in 2006. At that time the Technical University Munich and the Ludwig Maximillian University (Munich), together with the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology were named the initial recipients. Then in 2007 RWTH Aachen University, the Free University of Berlin, and the Universities of Freiburg, Göttingen, Heidelberg, and Konstanz were added.

The five new institutions now added are the Technical University Dresden, Humboldt University Berlin, University of Bremen, University of Cologne, and the University of Tübingen. They will receive the additional funding through 2017, while the Universities of Göttingen, Freiburg, and Karlsruhe have been dropped from the group of what has come to be known as the nation's "Elite Universities".