Scientific Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Pedagogy - School System, Educational and School Politics, grade: A, University of Groningen, course: Higher Education Systems - Comparative Country Studies, language: English, abstract: Higher Education is a vital aspect of everyday life, not only for students or professors, but also for external observers, since education is the most discussed factor throughout this economic crisis. Considering the importance of this topic, it is hard to believe that there are indeed several papers published on the issue of comparing the variety of countries with reference to their individual higher education systems and their ranking scores, while there is not one universal concept/ model within academic ranks that is applied when conducting comparative country studies, with special attention to higher education systems.