ABSTRACT
The European Tertiary Education Register (ETER) is the reference dataset on European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). ETER provides data on nearly 3,500 HEIs in about 40 European countries, including descriptive information, geographical information, students and graduates (with various breakdowns), revenues and expenditures, personnel, and research activities; as of March 2023, data cover the years from 2011-2020. ETER complies with OECD-UNESCO-EUROSTAT standards for educational statistics; most data are collected from National Statistical Authorities (NSAs) or ministries of participating countries and are subject to extensive checks and harmonization. The development of ETER has been funded by the European Commission and is part of the current efforts to establish a European Higher Education Sector Observatory; it is closely connected to the establishment of a broader data infrastructure in the field of science and innovation studies (RISIS). The ETER dataset is widely used in the scholarly literature on higher education and science policy, as well as for policy reports and analyses.
ABSTRACT
By using a comprehensive dataset of US and European universities, we demonstrate super-linear scaling between university revenues and their volume of publications and (field-normalized) citations. We show that this relationship holds both in the US and in Europe. In terms of resources, our data show that three characteristics differentiate the US system: (1) a significantly higher level of resources for the entire system, (2) a clearer distinction between education-oriented institutions and doctoral universities and (3) a higher concentration of resources among doctoral universities. Accordingly, a group of US universities receive a much larger amount of resources and have a far higher number of publications and citations when compared to their European counterparts. These results demonstrate empirically that international rankings are by and large richness measures and, therefore, can be interpreted only by introducing a measure of resources. Implications for public policies and institutional evaluation are finally discussed.
