Meinung: Wo ist dieser Gehirngewinn von Elite -US -Professoren, über die wir weiter sprechen?
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-canada-brain-gain-american-professors/
Meinung: Wo ist dieser Gehirngewinn von Elite -US -Professoren, über die wir weiter sprechen?
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-canada-brain-gain-american-professors/
6 Kommentare
Why would they move here for substantially less money and higher taxes? It sounds good in a news article but the reality is very few people are going to be willing to take a significant pay cut and move countries because the president
Probably going somewhere with a lower cost of living. Our housing crisis is one of the worst in the developed world. Doesn’t make us very attractive.
A lot of people don’t realize that our elite programs already have some of the best staff in the world. You have to be a juggernaut in your field to walk right into tenure in those programs.
Our very good programs are also incredibly well staffed.
There isn’t much space for these professors to come into
Same place as the people in 2016 who said they would move if Trump won, or the people over here who said they would move if Carney won. People love to threaten to move away if things don’t go their way, but rarely follow through.
For senior level positions you’re not going to be able to create a job and start in months. These aren’t entry level positions.
Where you’ll see the changes are in foreign students staying away from the US. We’ll pick up some of those as will the other top 25 international schools.
Then we’ll start to get some graduate students, which will lead to a few more profs and maybe some poaching of people out of the US.
What nobody understands is that this using a talent issue, it’s a resource issue. We have plenty of excellent talent already here; many schools have the potential to get better of course but what is really holding us back is funding. Even with the proposed cuts, US funding is far better than Canadian funding for research.
Let me put this in concrete numbers.
Let’s say you’re starting a lab in a top 50 school in the US. Not necessarily Harvard but let’s say a Northwestern or a University of Colorado or a University of Washington type of school. To set up your lab, you’re going to get a start-up at or above $1m USD. Then, you’ll be able to apply for federal grants through NSH or NIH that will pay between $100k-$1m USD per year to be budgeted towards equipment, personnel, and research materials.
In Canada, start-up will max out at about $200k-300k CDN. Likely much less. If you want equipment or facilities renovations, you’re going to need to apply for a CFI grant, which will involve substantial bureaucratic red tape within your institution. You will then write a NSERC DRG or the CIHR equivalent, which will be prorated not by your proposed research expenses, but by your seniority. As a starting researcher, you will probably have a complete discretionary research fund of $25-30k CDN. That may go up in three years, or it may not. It could also get zeroed out (this just happened to a bunch of early-mid career researchers). You can’t meaningfully write student or postdoc salaries into that budget because you get what you get, so you’re stuck trying to recruit students who will qualify for NSERC graduate research fellowships, but those are awarded proportionately across universities and are in fact becoming harder and harder to get. Because we don’t have a project grants system, you’re effectively capped out and have no way of raising additional funds unless you’re literally working with private capital or targeting very specific funding programs.
If you’re a superstar in the US looking at the Canadian research ecosystem, it’s a no brainer. Stay in the US or move to continental Europe. If you want to fix that you need to increase research funding in Canada by a factor of five or ten. End of story.