The brain drain of Greece’s best-and-brightest, who fled the country during a crushing economic crisis in search of a better life has seen major academic figures holding key positions at American universities.
They received their undergraduate degrees in Greece and now rank second,in the world, proportionately speaking, in terms of the number of academics it has exported to top American universities.
The finding comes from a study conducted by Tolga Yuret, an Associate Professor of Economics at the Technical University of Istanbul, who collected information about where 14,310 professors at 48 top American universities obtained their degrees, said Kathimerini.
Yuret found that 149 Greek academics work at the 48 American universities that were studied, comprising a ratio of 13.6 per million of the Greek population. Israel had 24.22 professors per million of its population and Canada third with 10.75 per million (382 academics).
That puts Greece first among European countries in the study, including the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Austria, Spain, Portugal and others.
In absolute numbers of academics at US colleges, the finding may be even more impressive with 149 Greeks. India, with a far huger population, has 604, followed by China with 515 and the UK with 470.
Next is Canada, then Russia, Germany, Israel and Taiwan, with Italy trailing Greece in 10th place.
“I firmly believe that tertiary education in Greece is extremely high-caliber and aims not just at amply educating students at every level but is also clearly geared toward the production of science via basic and applied research in a broad spectrum of fields,” Thanos Dimopoulos, a medical professor and the rector at Athens University, told Kathimerini in regard to the study.
“This very interesting study shows that more than 1 percent of regular professors at the top American universities are Greeks who got their degrees in Greece,” said John P.A. Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. “That would have been above 2 percent if it included Greeks born in Greece who were educated abroad, as well as second-generation Greeks. The study also does not include the areas of medicine and biology, where the Greek presence is even stronger.”
Ioannidis stressed that the areas in which Greeks tend to excel worldwide are in cutting-edge technologies needed for sustainable development.
Read more here.
RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Rennett Stowe License: CC-BY-SA
Source: thenationalherald.com
