News & Views item - July 2006

 

 

Brain Drain Across the Tasman. (July 10, 2006)

     Patrick Crewdson in yesterday's New Zealand Herald chattily reports on some of the 1,000 or so Kiwis who annually enter US colleges and universities but finishes asking rhetorically, "Do these bright graduates come back to New Zealand?" and replies,  "In many cases not."

 

Crewdson singles out one representative case which seems noteworthy in that it concerns Canada:

"How much is my patriotism worth?" asks Amanda Peet.
 
For the Canada-based physicist, a respected string theorist, that's the issue when she considers returning to New Zealand. Shared by dozens of other expat academics, it's the problem of the brain drain at its very brainiest.
 
For one thing, if Professor Peet were to trade her position at the gigantic University of Toronto for a job at a New Zealand university, she would be taking "a really significant pay cut".
 
But that's only part of the equation: "There's a lack of basic research funding. If there's a single thing that's kept me away from being interested in returning to New Zealand, it's that."
 
And the situation here is getting worse, not better, she says. "Academics have a much higher workload in terms of teaching, they're getting paid in real terms less than they were when I left, their research grants are often zero or very small, and it's very, very hard for even the brightest person with the most talent and a brand-name PhD under their belt to really produce good work under such circumstances."

For Peet, part of the solution lies in abandoning the "peanut-butter principle" that sees resources spread evenly but thinly (six physics departments when the population can really only support two, is the example she cites).