Fighting Over the Best and the Brightest

More and more highly qualified academics are fleeing Germany because the long-term prospects for the country's academic elite are not very appealing. One in seven students who complete a doctorate in Germany subsequently moves to the United States, and 30 percent of these graduates stay there for good.

Germans make up the third-largest group of foreign academics in the United States behind the Chinese and the Japanese. A total of 20,000 young German researchers currently work in the United States, above all natural scientists and engineers, as well as law and economics graduates. Three out of four Nobel Prize winners of German origin pursued their professional careers in the United States.

The impact on Germany is serious: Migration hampers Germany's ability to innovate and remain competitive. Where there are no researchers, there also will be no creative entrepreneurs.

German scientists are now sounding the alarm. Leading academics have put together a five-point program on behalf of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the free-market initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft that is aimed at turning the brain drain into a “brain gain“ (see box).

According to Max Huber, vice president of Germany's Academic Exchange Service, DAAD, the United States is the undisputed leader of the global education market. It attracts human capital from around the world, using all available competitive means. Foreigners generate half of all U.S. research results, compared with just 10 percent in Germany. Forty-five of the world's 50 leading universities are American. Munich, the only German university on this list, is ranked 48th. “We have to become more attractive, and that means offering incentives,“ Huber says. About 44 percent of German scientists abroad stated in a study conducted by the Stifterverband der deutschen Wissenschaft that they would like to return to Germany if working conditions improved.

The director of Hamburg think tank HWWA, Thomas Straubhaar, criticizes the European governments for handing the multi-billion education market for top researchers to the United States. “In Germany, it is still considered taboo to talk about education as a production factor and universities as money-making machines, while the United States has no problem cashing in on the sale of excellent education and training,“ he says.

More than half a million foreign students were registered at U.S. universities in the academic year 2002/2003. They paid nearly $12 billion in tuition and living expenses to U.S. universities, a revenue stream that other sectors can only dream of. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, education has become the fifth most important service export for the United States.

Asked how Germany can win back the best minds, Johanna Hey, a leading member of the German University Association, says, “Human capital is just as shy as financial capital.“ Experts agree therefore that German universities must be given greater autonomy. They have to be able to choose their students and professors. A central agency such as today's ZVS, which assigns students to universities across Germany, would no longer be needed in such a competitive environment.

Demands that all German universities must offer the same standard “are already fiction today,“ according to the chairman of the Academic Council, Karl Max Einhäupl. And the success of non-university research institutions such as the Max Planck Institutes shows that foreign top researchers have not yet written off Germany.