Some time ago, The European University Association (EUA) published a new follow-up to their 2009 study on university autonomy in Europe. The study includes 28 European countries, amongst them also two German lander.
The report included examining autonomy on four areas with a number of indicators : organisational (7), financial (11), staffing (8) and academic (12) autonomy. The scores indicated that it is UK and Estonia who received high scores on all four of these aspects whereas a number of other countries ranked more unevenly, receiving high scores on some aspects and lower on others.
It was also indicated that EUA would develop a visual tool for examining university autonomy early 2012, and this has now been launched on a separate webpage. While the data was also earlier presented in a report form, one cannot help but notice that this visualisation creates quite a nice and neat overview comparison between European countries in terms of these various indicators and does give a simple and quick comparison point for examining university autonomy.
Of course, one can question the content and selection of indicators, and the purposes of such ranking – but it nevertheless provides a quick comparison point for examining these areas across Europe.
You can view the visual tool here!