This text is part of a broader project of reconstruction of "university models" and their influence on academic and scientific-technological policies in three countries: Germany, USA and Brazil, reaching a more specific evaluation of Universidade de São Paulo. What is published here is a scheme of the "kernel" of this project, which seeks to reconstruct in their broad lines processes of structural change in the past decades in the US and Germany, in order to understand more clearly the terms and specificity of the Brazilian issue.
university; "university models"; structural change; academic and scientific-technological policies; USA; Germany; Brazil