Brandenburg’s economy is undergoing structural change, which opens exciting new prospects for highly skilled workers. The state has intensified efforts to diversify the economy towards cleaner and more knowledge-intensive industries, including the development of advanced manufacturing, spill-over effects from the start-up scene in Berlin, fostering entrepreneurial activities at its own higher education institutions, promoting innovative places for working and living, and phasing out of coal production in favour of next-generation technologies. As the engine of skills development and research, the higher education system will play an important role in helping the state unleash these opportunities. The German State of Brandenburg has therefore entrusted the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – in close collaboration with and supported by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support – with the development of recommendations on how to enhance the visibility of its institutions’ programme offer, align this offer with the skills and innovation demand, and make it more attractive to prospective students from the state and beyond.

The Higher Education series will offer policy advice to governments and other higher education stakeholders who would like to learn how well their systems are performing in comparison to others. The series will provide insights on how higher education systems are performing overall and in specific areas; why some systems are performing better than others; and what countries can learn from the experience of others. In addition to policy and working papers, the series includes reports on the conceptual and analytical frameworks that underpin the work, as well as regular syntheses and country reports on benchmarking higher education system performance and the in-depth analysis of selected higher education topics.