While the UK grapples with ever increasing cuts to the higher education budget and the looming possibility of devastating cuts to the science budget, scientists must feel a little jealousy for those who work in Germany.
Germany has put science and education at the centre of their plans for economic recovery and, unlike the UK, has put their money where their mouth is. The German federal government has increased investments to support higher education and research institutes to the tune of €800 million which will support growing student numbers and excellence in research and innovation. Meanwhile, the UK’s Department of Business Innovation and Skills has announced £836 million worth of efficiency savings (aka cuts) which will adversely affect British science and education.
With the little funding for science that is left in an ever shrinking pot, the UK Government plans to adopt recommendations from Cambridge venture capitalist, Dr Hermann Hauser, to set up a network of elite national technology and innovation centres. These so-called ‘Maxwell Centres’, named after the eminent physicist James Clerk Maxwell, are closely modelled on the German ‘Fraunhofer Institutes’ that undertake applied research to directly benefit the economy and society. In Dr Hermann’s report, he suggests that the Maxwell Centres should focus on existing areas of scientific strength and suggests stem cells, internet technologies and renewable energy as possible themes. The government has tasked the Technology Strategy Board to develop Dr Hermann’s ideas into a workable strategy.
So while the UK looks to German models to ensure economic benefit from science, German scientists are enjoying increased funding for basic and applied research. It certainly seems like Germany is doing something right.
WHAT???? You mean the German model of chasing the best people out of the country because THERE ARE NO JOBS?
The Fraunhofer Institutes are applied research institutions. A Fraunhofer replaced the Gesellschaft fuer Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (GMD) a while ago, to the detriment of basic research in mathematics and computer science.
Outside of those research institutes, the only permanent positions at universities these days are chairs. Yes, you read that right - professorial chairs. All lecturers below that level are effectively temping. The usual requirement for such a chair used to be a Habilitation, effectively a second PhD with a stronger literature review component which could include work from your own research group. There has been a half-baked attempt to replace this with a tenure-style system, but often, such tenure-track style posts have been created with no intention of giving the young professors permanent posts at the institution where they had the tt-style post. (If you are good enough, you're supposed to find a permanent post somewhere else.) Instead, people are turfed out and new cheap labour is recruited.
Add to that a strong bias against allowing people to fund themselves on grants for more than 5-6 years post PhD, and you get an awful lot of extremely well educated cabbies.
Add to that a real lack of childcare for small children, a view of working mothers as bad mothers, particularly in the West, and you get a very robust glass ceiling for people with vaginas. Btw, Germans are panicking because not enough babies are being born.
Sure, they are pumping money into the system, but for a reason - to stave off collapse.
I'm glad to be in the UK.
As the commenter above noted, funding isn't the whole story by any means. My supervisor in the UK is German, and is very glad to be here and out of the German system.
"If it wasn't a science there wouldn't be an institute. Just like women are science and so there is a Women's Institute."
Has the Excellence Initiative not helped the problem of few permanent positions? For example, at the Frankfurt Institute for Molecular Life Sciences teaching-only positions are offered to those who do not obtain tenure providing some security and certainly incentive for research excellence? There are also junior professorships available at some universities and research institutes (though rare). It seemed to me that the German system is moving more towards a tenure-track US model.