Slashdot Mirror

Rankings could be bunk, but the highest ranked university in Germany is LMU Munich, which is tied for #30. Eighteen U.S. universities are ranked higher, including five that are public. The highest ranked Central or South American university is the University of São Paulo in Brazil, which is in the 251-300 range. In my experience, if they want you, most schools will pay your way w.r.t. the Ph.D. Master's not so much, since it's viewed as a path to industry and not academia.

Naah, they should have used StackOverflow's programming tutorials instead.

Those same students bid up the tuition costs for our own citizens. And aren't the leftist universities supposed to be non-profit? To heck with asian students. Send them home.

No, that is not how it works. The increased prices "out of state" and "out of country" students pay are the result of institutions being able to raise those rates because (1) there is little political downside to raising the price for non-locals and (2) those students are willing and able to pay it. If we dumped the foreign students, the institution's income would be lower, which would put more rather than less upward pressure on local fees.

Education is not a perfect free-market system. There are a relatively small number of "elite" institutions who do not really compete against each other based on price - students generally do not choose Harvard or Cambridge or Oxford or Stanford or CalTech (or Toronto which I see made the top 20 - https://www.timeshighereducati... ) based on differences in tuition fees, and the institutions do not base their acceptance purely on some sort of intellectual ability. Those places that managed to attract and retain students who later become successful alumni are the ones that end up doing well in the long run in terms of world reputation. Hopefully it is because they taught their students to be successful, though there seems to be a lot of data indicating that they mostly managed to pick the students most likely to have been successful in any case.

Great post, thanks.

You are right to lament the lack of confidence in the UK academic community, yet it's hardly surprising when the UK already offers one of the lowest postdoc wages in the EU. For the younger scientists, their position was already on shaky ground any way, and Brexit is just a nail in the coffin. The more senior academics will probably stay the course, but with less grant money they will fire their postdocs and not take on any more students and their research groups will wallow until the grant money can flow again.

As for foreign pension investments benefiting from a weaker pound, you are absolutely correct. I am possibly incorrect in my assessment, but I am expecting the lower value of the pound to reflect a general decrease in perceived value in the UK economy. Surprisingly the FTSE 100 has grown consistently throughout 2016, so perhaps the economy is not recoiling from Brexit as much as I had thought. Of course the full ramifications are hard to predict, since it will be years before the full effects will come to light. As a scientist with only passing economic experience but who is widely read and tries to keep up with the business news, my impression is that actually leaving the EU will be bad for the UK in the short to medium term. Long-term is anyone's guess, but my national pride does lead me to believe that long-term things will recover. That is perhaps quite irrational, but no-one's perfect.

I think that Hawking and the scientific community are pretty much experts on the subject they wrote about: how scientific research is funded and who does it, and how Brexit would affect it. And in my opinion their prediction is head on: it would be a disaster. Research is pretty much an international affair, and doing it without EU grants and with less cooperation from EU scientists is clearly going to make it harder.

Do you really think if some project wanted Hawking or some other noted scientist or that they wanted to participate in some project that it is going to depend on whether or not the UK is part of the EU? As you state, research is an international affair. Even in times or war, scientists have been able to travel to where the research or symposium was.

I think you are making a straw man argument. What I said is that UK scientists will not get EU grants and will have less collaborations with EU scientists. I never said that Hawking or some famous scientists are going to have any problems participating in whichever project they want. Science, however, is not made only by famous people; in fact, the great majority of scientists are not famous (as you probably know). To give you an example of how is life for non-famous scientists, imagine that the EU is funding a project called RAQUEL on randomness and entanglement. The researchers on this field are writing their proposal to get the funding: the research goals, the time span, and crucially, the participants. They know a really good researcher on this field that works in the University of Bristol, Andreas Winter. Now will they sweat to get some extra funding outside the EU to be able to get Andreas Winter on the project, or they will simply choose instead Andris Ambainis, an equally good researcher from the University of Latvia that the EU will be happy to fund? In this imaginary case Andreas will not get the money nor will he be invited to the scientific meetings. In the real world what happened is that both got funded by the project and collaborated.

And I don't see what is your point about scientists being able to travel even in times of war. Did I ever suggest otherwise? I agree with you, it is laughable the idea that Brexit would make it hard for UK scientists to travel wherever they want.

While it is unlikely that the UK will get EU grants, it is not unlikely that UK scientists will be prohibited from participating in EU funded projects. In addition, it is likely that there will be as much funding for UK projects because the UK funding will not be spread over the entire EU.

I think one can get a good idea about what will happen to the UK by looking at what happened to Switzerland after they voted to restrict immigration from the EU. So indeed, they got no EU funding (in particular none of the coveted ERC grants), but they are allowed to participate in EU projects. They actually got less money than before, however, as they were extremely successful in getting research grants (only less successful than the UK, I believe). They paid about €1.6 billion and got back about €1.8 billion.