Brain Drain / Brain Gain

How Much Is a Professor Worth? - NYTimes.com

In a new book, “Paying the Professoriate,” to be published this month, Mr. Altbach and his co-editors examine academic salaries, contracts and benefits in publicly funded universities in 28 countries. They depict a world increasingly divided “into two categories — brain drain and brain gain,” as countries with more resources siphon off academic talent from poorer countries. In Mexico some universities are fighting back, offering faculty members a marriage bonus — for first marriages — and “two hard-cider bottles and a frozen turkey at Christmas.” They also show a profession that in many countries is subject to a widening gap between professors at top research universities and those who work at colleges devoted mainly to teaching, “who are lower in the academic pecking order and who now constitute the large majority of the academic work force.”All currencies were converted into U.S. dollars using a purchasing power parity index based on the cost of a set of items in the United States. But they also compared salaries in each country with that country’s average per capita gross domestic product, giving a sense of how academics were paid in comparison to pay for compatriots in other jobs. Finally each of the 28 country teams was asked whether the average academic salary for that country was “sufficient to support a middle-class standard of living.”

via How Much Is a Professor Worth? – NYTimes.com.

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