July 3, 2006
The Country That Doesn’t
I talked to a few moving companies earlier on. I called them up for an offer to move my belongings during what I euphemistically have come to call “the big one.” They were not surprised by my request. According to the agents I talked to, this is their best time of the year. They can barely offer you a container or a slot on a ship. I am part of their biggest customer group. According to the companies, their market splits up into 4 percent versus 96 %. The smaller figure consists of diplomats and managers of international ranking. 96 percent are academics who all move during the summer month. And only four percent move to Germany. NINETY-ONE percent are academics that found a job somewhere else. Most of them move to North America; most of them have been hired by a North American academic institution.
The number of academics leaving the German-speaking countries is disturbing. Google German, academic and brain drain and you get 599,000 hits. According to statistics, every seventh person with a doctorate in science leaves Germany for the United States, one in four researchers stay abroad. Studies suggest that over 6.000 German academics work in higher institution in the US. All of the examples mentioned so far concern scholars who received most of their graduate education in Germany, and moved to the English-speaking world only after their dissertation. There are, of course, also those who got brain-drained at an earlier stage, i.e. those who obtained their graduate degrees in the North America or the UK and didn't return. In can name at least eight German academics working in my field in Canada from the top of my head; my area of specialization is taken over by German and Austrian Ph.D. students at Western, UBC, and McMaster’s.
It is very difficult to remain at a German University at junior level with a qualified graduate degree. Germany is pretty good at educating people to a certain level, but then it gets difficult because there are limited options. There are many incentives for German universities to hire from within at junior level, especially in current context of scarcity of jobs. And given the number of junior jobs that are actually advertised openly and not distributed via contacts, it is not surprising that few academics stay, even if they wanted. The "Old Boys Network" of the German scientific community, where jobs do not always go to the most highly qualified candidates, but those with the best connections, is still in place. There is strong institutional inertia against changing all this, despite the on-going lament.
It is difficult to judge how bad the brain drain really is. In recent years, German research institutions have taken steps to make t he prospect of pursuing a career in Germany more appealing to young researchers, but that only effects a few well-sponsored fields. The situation for young academics pursuing careers in the Social Sciences and in the Humanities lacks any initiative. The mission to keep them here is failing. Even though "Brain Gain instead of Brain Drain" is the word, the state of bureaucratic madness and lack of resources dim any signs of progress. I am so grateful for the chance to get out of here.