Brain drain in higher education in Europe: current trends and future perspectives.

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, certain European Union (EU) initiatives such as the Erasmus programme provided the opportunity to a great number of academics, researchers and students to move for a relatively short period of time to other EU member states in order to enhance their skills and improve their career potential (a phenomenon known as ‘brain circulation’). The popularity of particular member states such as Italy, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdoom has gradually created an influx of highly skilled staff especially from the less developed EU member states, from Southern Europe and the former Eastern European countries. The proposed changes in the EU Higher Education and Research frameworks during the 1990s and the 2000s encupsulated in the Bologna and Lisbon initiatives respectively, have had controversial results. In addition, the internationalisation and to a great extent the (competitive) commercialisation of Higher Education (HE) has left many EU member states behind since they failed to reform their national HE systems. A masive exodus of academics and researchers was observed from 2008 until 2017, mainly from the countries that suffered more the consequeses of the economic crisis (Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus). The destination (host) countries included primarily locations within the EU, with the most popular being the the UK and Germany. The mass emigration of academic staff within and outside the EU (‘brain drain’) is causing loss of highly skilled human capital with catastrophic consequenses for the sending (home) countries. On the other hand, host member states utilise to the maximum the capabilities of the EU academics and researchers (‘brain gain’) in order to achieve competitive advantage in the so called ‘knowledge economy’.