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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the author of the article wanting to do good, but the last thing we need here in Eastern Europe is even more brain drain.

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It’s tragic so many of us have had to leave after 89. And I completely agree with you that this trend must be fought.

However, I also think helping students have better lives is good overall. Many of us come back later. Perhaps if in the future there is a political change back towards worker power, many more of us will come back. And we’ll have useful skills honed in the meantime.

So your students in some provincial eastern European university can barely get a C on an exam, trashing their GPAs in the process, closing life-long opportunities, because of the "only the professor deserves an A" attitude that then translates to reference letters and everywhere else. The same student then gets a 3.8+ GPA at a top 10 US university with glaring reviews of their work and 10x higher compensation the moment they decide to enter the industry. How are you going to stop the brain drain?

Not really, they get good results in school but so so domestic employment opportunities. Even in IT we're basically a country where work is being outsourced. Nobody is going to stop the brain drain, unless Eastern Europe economies grow to become G7 members, which is highly unlikely.

Political change? You're too optimistic. And about worker power, Eastern Europe is going to have a South Asia workforce soon. I met a couple of nice Bangladeshis this weekend. They are working in my country. I choose to welcome them, as they probably get enough mistreatment and xenophobia at work.

Political change will happen as the global crisis intensifies. Whether it’ll be towards fascism or towards socialism, we’ll see.

All workers can seize the means of production together, Eastern European and South Asian. It has happened before all over Eastern Europe, it can happen again.

You just described how to get brain drain, by limiting the development of your students you will for ever be stuck with no outside influences. Students will often come home even if they get education abroad.

> Students will often come home even if they get education abroad.

Nope, that "often" part is false, at least when it comes to most of Eastern Europe (maybe in other parts of the world things are different).

This ONLY happens in countries with high salary ceilings: China, India, etc, or countries with high QoL despite low salaries: Southern Europe, Czechia.

Is it really that bad? I often see people who go back after the fourth postdoc/job, but I guess that is such a small group of people that it's more noticeable.

That's probably 0.0001% of people. And Romania has a super low amount of researchers from the get go, lower than EU average for sure.

After you invest in a good education abroad, you are definitely not going back home to put it to waste working for cronies or doing 'crisis management'. You're only going back home if you're outsourcing work from developed countries, competing on a new market with less players or getting prosecutor's office position and an opportunity to lock up some of the old boys.

Yes, because hiding information is definitely going to slow down the brain drain.

Believe me it wont be this article that will cause a brain drain.

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