Charlemagne: Battling for brains

The parlous state of European universities

NO EUROPEAN summit can conclude nowadays without talking up plans to make Europe the most competitive “knowledge-based” economy in the world. EU leaders' fondness for this notion, first expressed in Lisbon four years ago, is understandable. Asians pay themselves less than Europeans, and Americans work longer hours - what option is left for the old continent but to rely on its intellectual resources?

There is one big snag, however. One of Europe's primary intellectual resources, its university system, is in terrible shape. Just how terrible was underlined in the recent annual survey by Shanghai's Jiao Tong University of the world's universities. This ranking gave eight of the top ten places to American institutions, with only Oxford and Cambridge breaking the American monopoly. You had to get down to 39th before an EU university outside Britain (the University of Utrecht) featured.

Many of Europe's best brains have been migrating to America to work on the world's best campuses. A survey conducted for the European Commission in 2003 estimated that 400,000 EU-born scientific researchers are working in the United States; and three out of four have no plans to return. Academics who emigrate to America find that they are in a system that seems awash with money, in comparison with Europe's. The United States spends 2.7% of GDP on its universities, according to the latest OECD figures; in France and Britain the figure is 1.1%, in Germany only 1%. A full professor at a top British university gets around £45,000 ($80,000) a year; his equivalent at an American Ivy League college can expect twice as much, and a lot more if he is a big name. Research projects are also more lavishly funded in America. The consequences for Europe's “knowledge economy” are grim. The EU produces a quarter as many patents per million people as does the United States.

The financial problems of European universities stem from their near-total reliance on the public purse. Of the 1% of GDP that Germany spends on higher education, only 0.1% comes from the private sector. Students do not pay fees in France and Germany or in most other EU countries. State funding to universities is mean and under pressure. In Britain, where student fees have been brought in, they are hugely controversial, although they are nowhere near covering the real cost of a student's education. The result is not just that universities are starved of cash, but that students often dawdle pointlessly over their courses.

Michael Burda, an economics professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, says that, because his students are not paying personally, many “just use university as a way of filling in time.” Lecture halls are crammed and the average student in his department takes 5.5 years to complete a first degree. Many European universities now look for alternative sources of funding - whether bequests from alumni or business sponsorship - but the process is far less developed than in the United States.

State control has other pernicious effects. Colleges in France and Germany do not control their admissions policies; their students are largely allocated to them by the state. This makes it harder to develop elite institutions. Even in Britain, the top universities are under huge pressure from the government to make their admissions policies less “elitist”.

Many governments across Europe have sworn to do something about the parlous state of their universities. The British have imposed tuition fees and the Italians have tried to reduce security of tenure for academics, to make them more accountable. The German government has promised to create ten elite universities. It wants to revive the scientific traditions of the first third of the 20th century, when German scientists carried off 25 Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics alone, and German science-based industries led the world. But Mr Burda dismisses the plan as “smoke and mirrors”, complaining that it has been eviscerated by politicians and that the new money that has been promised is “peanuts”.

Self-inflicted wounds

Europe's universities cannot, on present form, look to their own governments to save them. But they may have inadvertently been given a lifeline by the American government. Post-September 11th paranoia has made it increasingly hard for foreign students to get a visa to enter the United States. Robert Gates, a former director of the CIA who is now president of Texas A&M University, wrote recently in the International Herald Tribune that applications by foreign students to his institution had fallen by 38% on last year. He said applications from China to all American universities had fallen by 76%, and those from India had fallen by 58%. And he argued that this would have a direct effect on America's scientific pre-eminence, since “the research efforts at many American universities depend on international graduate students. They do much of the laboratory work that leads to new discoveries.”

If America, which has traditionally had first pick of the world's top talent, is now turning much of it away, the opportunity for European institutions is clear. The number of foreign students from outside Europe rose by 60% in British universities between 1997 and 2003, driven mainly by an increase in Chinese students. Institutions in the rest of the EU are getting in on the act. An increasing number are teaching courses in English so that they can capitalise on the flow of foreign students.

But Europe's opportunity to pull in the world's talent may be fleeting. Other countries, such as Australia, New Zealand and even Japan, are competing harder for overseas students. Britain's share of the overseas-student market has dropped. And protests from universities in the United States may persuade the American government to relax its approach to foreign students. It may prove easier to fix America's visa policy than to cure the deeper-seated problems of Europe's universities.

Commentary feature discusses 'the parlous state of European universities'.

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