A new report on the brain drain from Israeli universities suggests that the ratio of Israeli academics working in the United States to those in Israel is nearly 25 percent.
The report, “Brain Drained,” is based on a study by Dan Ben-David of the department of public policy at Tel Aviv University. It says that “a massive policy breakdown” in higher education has created conditions in which “the rate of academic emigration from Israel to the United States is unparalleled in the Western world.”
In the report, Mr. Ben-David argues that a shortage of university teaching and research posts here “has made it extremely difficult for young new researchers to return to Israel,” and so “a large and growing number of Israel’s top researchers and scientists have emigrated from the country, primarily to the United States.”
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 82,905 foreign scholars worked at American universities in 2003-4, representing 7.1 percent of the combined senior academic staff.
Of those, the largest single group was 3,117 British scholars, representing 2.1 percent of the senior academic faculty in Britain. Among Canadian scholars, the ratio of those residing in the United States that academic year to those in Canada was 12.2 percent.
Philosophers From Afar
Israeli scholars were far ahead of that rate. “The 1,409 Israeli academics residing in the States in 2003-4 represented 24.9 percent of the entire senior staff in Israel’s academic institutions that year—twice the Canadian ratio and over five times the ratio in the other developed countries,” writes Mr. Ben-David.
He says that the numbers of Israelis working in the United States are equal to one-eighth of all Israel’s chemists, 15 percent of the country’s philosophers, and 29 percent of “top Israeli economists.”
“The group with the greatest proportional representation in the top American departments is computer science,” he reports. “The number of Israelis in just the top 40 U.S. computer-science departments represents a full third of the entire contingent remaining in Israel.”
Israel’s educational policy makers have been concerned for some time about a brain drain. A government committee that reported last year on reforms in higher education recommended specific new spending to encourage talented young academics to stay in Israel and to lure back those who had left.
Rabbi Michael Melchior, chairman of the education committee in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, puts the total number of Israeli academics abroad at about 3,000—more than double the figure cited by Mr. Ben-David.
“It costs about $1-million to train and educate someone to professor level,” Mr. Melchior told The Chronicle. “So we’ve paid about $3-billion, which has been thrown out of the window.”
