There has never been a better time to attract academics from the United States to Europe. But all signs suggest that Europe will fumble this opportunity.
Today, more than 100,000 Europeans with PhDs are working in the United States. Recognizing this, governments and universities across Europe are scrambling to announce programs to attract US-based researchers. Yet, for those familiar with American universities, these efforts range between meek and timid.
On Monday, the President of the European Commission, announced a €500 million two-year effort to attract global researchers. So, let’s put this number into context. In the United States, many universities operate with an endowment model. You can think of this as a big “savings account” that pays 4% a year. Universities can spend that 4% in their operations while the savings account continues to grow.
So, we can contextualize the Choose Europe program by looking at an American University with an endowment that pays about €250 million a year. So does Choose Europe match the endowment payments of Harvard, Princeton, or Yale? Not even close. It is comparable to the endowment payments of Ohio State University.
Not only the investment is small, but the current compensation gaps are already large. A full-time professor at Universidad Complutense in Madrid receives about 35 thousand euros a year[i]. At the University of Michigan, the average salary of professors is $207 thousand,[ii] meaning that in four years a Michigan professor receives what a tenured professor in Spain collects over a twenty-year career. The gap is a chasm.
Certainly, some places in Europe, such as Denmark[iii], pay their academics better than France, Italy, or Spain. But even in these cases the balance tends to favor the United States. To leave their labs behind, and relocate their families, Europeans working in America will need more than what is being offered in some of the recently announced programs.[iv]
If budgets represent priorities, Europe is not putting its money where its mouth is.
But the point of this essay is not to complain about the meekness of European innovation policy. It is to hopefully “poke the bear” and convince Europe to be bolder when it comes to this opportunity. Europe is not only an amazing place to live and to raise a family, but it is the birthplace of foundational ideas.
So, how could we build Europe back into a global research powerhouse?
Consider fighting fire with fire and building a European Research Endowment. A continental investment vehicle that would allow Europe to compete for talent head-to-head with the US. As an example, imagine an endowment with a size of one-eight of Europe’s €800 billion rearmament plan. That would be a €100 billion endowment that would get invested by a professional portfolio management team. That is roughly the combined endowment of Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, a reasonable amount for a continental level effort. Using the famous 4% endowment rule would mean that Europe would have an additional €4 billion a year on research funding, not for three years but “forever.”[v] Four billion would represent a 30 to 40 percent increase to Europe’s Horizon program, which has a budget of about €12 billion a year (€95 billion from 2021 to 2027).
While the endowment is invested in the growth of Europe, the payout could be used in a myriad of ways. Europe could, for instance, create 4,000 excellence chairs with a budget of one million euros each. Again, not for three years, but forever. One million a year is twice the research support of the most prestigious European research award, the ERC grant, which in their most generous incarnation pays about €2.5 million over five years. Of course, there could be other ways to distribute these funds, and there is a good argument about the need to spend more in the scholars and universities that are already in Europe, but the point is that one bold move can sometimes move the needle further than 1,000 weak ones. If we fail to reach the proverbial tipping point the scales won’t tilt in Europe’s favor.
Another thing that Europe could do, is to explicitly open up its academic system to professor-entrepreneurs. Unlike the United States or China,[vi] which benefit enormously from professor-entrepreneurs, Europe’s tech transfer system is built on the idea of companies acquiring knowledge by collaborating with academia. This leads to a lot of meetings and events, but few professors led startups. In the United States and China, the figure of professor entrepreneurship is extremely common, and celebrated. An extreme example is Bob Langer, an Institute Professor at MIT that has been involved in the founding of more than 30 different companies. The reason why you want professor-entrepreneurs is that ideas don’t travel on paper but inside minds. So, you want the academic who discovered the peptide, or the algorithm, to be involved in the company that tries to commercialize it. Having a professor make it “big” through entrepreneurship is not a misuse of public funds. It is one of the most effective vehicles through which research funding benefits the “real” world. A professor entrepreneur creates numerous research jobs in and out of academia while helping keep the economies they are embedded in at the technological frontier. Entrepreneurial activities are also unlikely to distract people with a passion for research, since professor entrepreneurs are inspired by the opportunity to double down on their academic interests while generating resources they can pour into their ideas.
And finally, we should not forget about Europe’s famous red tape, which can sometimes take comical proportions. Spanish scholars are world famous for having to ask conference organizers to print mock diplomas so they can get their travel expenses reimbursed (the famous “papelito Español”). In France, I remember buying a laptop for a postdoc that arrived 18 months after I placed the order, or 8 months after the postdoc finished his appointment and left the country. There are important gains Europe can make if regulators start thinking about which rules and procedures to remove or simplify, instead of which rules to add.
European academia is at the doorway of a once in a generation opportunity. Scholars in the United States are more susceptible than ever to consider moving out of the US. But to consider Europe as an option, we need to get our act together. I doubt this will happen.
Please prove me wrong.
Article paru dans Le Monde le 16 mai 2025
[i] https://www.ucm.es/portaldetransparencia/retribuciones-pdi-laboral
[ii] https://www.umsalary.info/titlesearch.php?Title=PROFESSOR&Year=0
[iii] https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-at-the-university-of-copenhagen-2024/#:...
[iv] A large university in France recently announced a €3 million endowment for hosting American researchers. Using the proverbial 4% rule means they are allocating a whopping €120,000 a year. Another university announced a three-year effort to raise €15 millions to attract 15 researchers. This boils down to about €300k/year for each research team, including the compensation of the PI, a modest starting package for American Standards considering that the program provides no job security after the first three years (and likely a salary of about €3000 or less for those able to secure a permanent position). Why risk it in Europe if you can wait it out in America?
Spain is another country trying to put its best foot forward. They recently announced an upgrade of a three-year program designed to attract international researchers. The budget is €45 million, or €15 million a year.[iv] In the past this program has attracted 58 scientists, most of which are Spanish citizens (59%). But again, the program provides little certainty about what would happen to these teams once the incentive is over. Also, it is important to keep in mind that Spain is a country with a GDP of about €1.5 trillion and government spending of about €600 billion a year. The effort to prop up their academic roster is only 0.0025% of their annual government spending and equivalent to the endowment payment of a US university that is too small to be listed at the US National Education Center for Statistics Website.[iv] It is about a third of what the endowment of the University of Alabama, the 120th best endowed university, would pay in a year.
[v]Over the last five years the SP500 had a return of 92%.
[vi] In China this started in the early to mid 80s with the famous story of Chen Chunxian. I explore this story in detail in my upcoming book, The Infinite Alphabet (Penguin Random-House)
Illustration: European Parliament from EU, CC BY 2.0
