An important observation in the context of the federal-state competition "Advancement through Education: Open Universities" is a further development of the study format "Certificate" and the associated partial use of a classification and accumulation system from the Swiss higher education system. The questions arise as to whether these observations can be confirmed and possibly generalized for other universities, what causes the developments and how they are justified or legitimized. Against the background of the type of 'continuing master program', which was only introduced as part of the Bologna Process, the relationship between certificate degrees and academic master's degree is of interest from an educational policy perspective.
Methodologically, the research project, financed from basic funds, will be based on the one hand on approaches of neo-institutionalist organizational theory, with which not only questions of legitimation can be explained but also that of isomorphism in developments, and on the other hand with the Économie des conventions. The latter appears to be suitable for examining the justification for investments in new educational formats and for identifying dimensions of the economy of an education market and its coordination of actions using the example of academic continuing education.