1 Brain Drained Part 2: A Tale of Two Countries

This is the second of a two part series of articles providing a comparative examination of how universities in two countries, the United States and Israel, have evolved over the past few decades – and how differences between the two have culminated in a rate of academic brain drain from the latter to the former that is unparalleled in the western world. The first article concentrated on the extent of academic migration to the States while this article focuses on how different higher education policies in the United States and in Israel led to the academic migration. These two articles are based on a couple of recent CEPR paper by the author. While the number of European scholars in America ranges from 1 % to 4 % of the scholars in their individual home countries, 73 % of those who received their PhDs in the States have indicated that they would prefer to remain there (European Commission, 2003). Sounds far-fetched? A look at what has already happened to Israel should serve as a warning that this is not a number that Europe should take lightly. The number of Israeli academics in U.S. universities has already reached 25 % of the scholars still remaining in Israel, and there is no clear end in sight for this freefall. Given the importance of frontier academic research universities in the growth of nations – particularly in this new millennium – there is a lesson here that Europe needs understand well if it wishes to avoid the Israeli predicament