i think the salary would kill the idea for most americans who would want to move. according to this chart:
https://oira.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/297/2024/05/Fa...
the average assistant professor makes around 100k usd a year.
the salary range in Norway which typically has some of the highest salaries in Europe for university of Oslo assistant professor would be around rank 73-75 (you are not typically eligible to be hired above 78 and in practice above 75) on this chart which is around 69-70k usd:
https://www.uio.no/english/for-employees/employment/payments...
Norway has some of the highest salaries in europe outside of switzerland (although its debatable since cost of living in switzerland is so high). how many people would be willing to take a 25-30% salary reduction to move across the world? and that is the minimum salary decrease as the percentage only increases when you go to other countries where salaries are lower.
Not to mention they will need to learn a new language to be a professor since they need to teach. And also the academic system is different in that most places have more hierarchy than USA whether it is implicit or explicit. So they have to learn to navigate that too.
I think people will find Canada a much more attractive target destination than elsewhere for these reasons. But I also think most won’t actually move they will just discuss it. Happy to be wrong though.
EDIT: Salaries also do not equate to quality of living. While Canada might not be the best example with housing prices being as high as they are, they do have other benefits, such as the average American paying more for wealth care. And in the case of the EU, there's other things to consider, such as their cities vs American cities (walkable vs drivable), individuals might also be interested in experiencing foreign countries with long history, unique cultures, etc... especially considering these are academic people.
There's all sorts of reasons one could take a lower salary for that occurs to me, and I'm sure many more that don't. Of course more money IS always welcome.
Anyone who does not want to worship Jesus or Trump is welcome to check out the Netherlands.
the wild card variable here is the value of dollar. The actions like protectionist tariffs and isolating of the economy with resulting inflation would be significant factors weakening the currency globally and domestically. So, it isn't the situation when there are countries better than US, it is just US is on track to become much worse than it has been so far, and it may fall close to the other developed countries, and in that case other considerations may become important too.
Wages are about half of the US yet in places like Toronto the COL is super high.
These profs likely negotiated a fat payday. It happens all the time - profs move from Harvard, Stanford, Yale to less prestigious schools because they’ll get something they otherwise can’t get - tenure, head of a school, more money, whatever.
Considering this move would have taken months to negotiate it likely has nothing to do with politics at all.
How does that compare to academic jobs in Europe?
You're right about the salaries but a bigger issue is that academics is financially in trouble everywhere, not just in the US. In some places I know of the political factors behind this trend kind of echo in a weak way some of the problems in the US, like decreased immigration, in some cases brought on by legislative decisions and whatnot. There just isn't a huge pool of money for academics anywhere. Maybe the EU, Canada, or Australia or NZ can step up to the plate, but pretty much everyone I've talked to in those areas have been in financial crises of their own.
I just don't see a huge upswing in funding so far with these things.
Some of the hiring initiatives that have been touted in the media, for example, in Europe, have been laser focused on areas that have been targeted by Trump, such as climate, vaccines, and sexual and gender minority researchers, and even there the funds are pretty limited.
Similarly, this piece points out these Yale professors were being recruited for two years before making this decision. They cite Trump in their decision to move, which I don't doubt played a role, but I also can't help but wonder how much after the fact rationalization is going on or in similar cases whether it's more the feather that broke the camel's back. It just looks like something that had a good chance of happening anyway.
I guess what I'm saying is so far what I've seen looks a lot like academic recruitment always looks, with a couple of very minor exceptions. I'm not hearing about a lot about efforts to do something that might not have otherwise happened, or to leverage "moneyball" tactics in hiring Americans.
Edit: Just looking at big tech CEOs, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, all are run by people who came to the US for school.
This is congruent with what I’ve heard from my colleagues about this topic, as well as from my own research.
If our worst fears are realized in America, who else is capable of absorbing all of the scholars in America who want to continue pursuing scholarly work?
Even before MAGA’s freezing of NIH and NSF funds, I was already disillusioned with the funding milieu, which is one of the reasons why I am a tenure-track instructor at a community college (100% teaching and service) instead of aiming for a professorship at a university where fundraising is often vital for tenure.
Industry, where I used to work as a researcher before changing careers to teaching, is not a panacea for those who want to do long-term research that is not dictated by short- and medium-term business needs. The days of places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs ended roughly 30 years ago, and since then industry research has been increasingly focused on the short- and medium-term.
Between the high-debt fiscal situations that the governments of many developing nations face and the unwillingness for industry and the wealthy these days to fund long-term research projects that are not tied to any specific gains, I don’t see the situation improving for academics soon.
One way out of this is to convince millionaires and billionaires that academic pursuits are worth funding. We need more places like the Institute for Advanced Study, more grants like the MacArthur Fellowship.
For Canadians considering working in the US, the recent politically-motivated detentions and deportations against green card holders - a group that has significantly stronger rights of abode than TN visa holders under USMCA - certainly factors into the calculus of whether a US job is worth it.
Further, the appeal of the American political environment is inversely correlated with the distance between one's personal characteristics and the feature vector of able-bodied, white, male, cisgender, and heterosexual. This is nothing new, but the importance of these characteristics, especially the last three or four, have dramatically increased with the rightward shift of the US over the past few years - and there are also more individuals in Canadian STEM (i.e. TN-eligible) degrees than ever before who don't have these characteristics.
Just to put some HN-relevant ballpark numbers to it, the University of Waterloo, a notorious Silicon Valley hiring pool, is reporting 38.6% women [0] in their 2024 engineering admissions. This was 21.2% in 2014 [1], the earliest year with statistics available.
I don't think it is much of a stretch to say the 2014 first years were more likely to aspire to intern at, say, Tesla or Meta than the 2024 first years (who will be entering their first co-op internships in a month's time). That is a function of both the American tech companies having cozied up to the political right, and an increased proportion of the students being both more directly affected [2] and morally repulsed [3] by this state of affairs.
Add an additional nationalism multiplier for Canadians being turned off by the annexation rhetoric coming out of the US, and I think we may see a change in this trend towards Canada retaining more of its local talent.
[0] https://uwaterloo.ca/engineering/about/faculty-engineering-s...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140804070109/https://uwaterloo...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/27/roe-wa...
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12...
I am not a prof, I had a similar opportunity 40 years ago, but it was a different time back then. Now, I would have jumped.
Depending on who you ask, the US is still the only country to have freedom of speech and the right to bear arms against a tyrannical government, which might be appealing for some of the top intellectuals (mostly Y Combinator founders, I think?)
I question the intellectual capacity of anyone who actually buys into this mythology.
Especially given the number of countries - presumably without freedom of speech or a right to bear arms - which have been far more successful at dealing with tyrannical governments than the US.
As a person in tech, this time around the tech community gave up on innovation and independence, they are the first to pander to the administration. I cannot imagine the same thing happening a decade or two ago. Something fundamentally changed here in the Valley. I take it as a signal that the powers be don’t believe in AI revolution and that they just want to make a quick buck while they can
But I think whether that pressure cooker creating the most extreme examples had existed or not, the "Do no evil", utopian phase of tech was always destined to be a blip, caused by a sudden, massive influx of cash to people who hadn't been inculcated in the culture of how to defend and grow such a cash hoard. They learned. No surprise at all to see, for example, Zuckerberg tossing the president a $20 million "legal settlement" bribe a few days after he was voted in; he has his priorities in order for his role.
