In this study, we investigate whether research topics in economics and business administration differ between German public and private universities. While institutional theory and resource dependence perspectives suggest that variations in funding structures and organizational missions could lead to distinct research orientations, other frameworks emphasize increasing homogenization across academic institutions. Using a large-scale text analysis of 63,994 dissertation titles and 124,580 journal article titles published between 1995 and 2020, we employ structural topic modeling (STM) to identify research topics and assess differences in their distributions by institutional type. To do this, we train an STM using all journal article titles and 75% of the dissertation titles to then test it on the remaining unseen dissertation titles. Contrary to expectations from theories of institutional divergence, our analysis reveals similar topic structures between public and private universities. Researchers of private and public universities focus on comparable research topics, with only small variations. This similarity is also persistent throughout the years. These findings suggest that within German higher education, strong forces of institutional isomorphism and disciplinary standardization prevail. In this study, we highlight how, despite differences in governance and resource environments, public and private universities operate within a shared framework shaped by international academic standards. The results contribute to ongoing debates about differentiation and homogenization in higher education, demonstrating how computational text analysis can uncover structural patterns in the production of academic knowledge.