I sympathise having been in a similar position myself. Education and research should be the priority for Australia, which is clearly not the case. This is Howard's legacy and we are at a crossroads. Election 2022: Australia spent a million dollars training me – and now I’m leaving
Very true - junior is aiming for a BioMed research based PhD, specialising in virology and genetics - and is very aware that she'll have to head overseas, perhaps for the PhD itself but definitely for research work
It’s all about vote winning! Cutting education and research budgets and put to welfare has been a strategy since Keating s era. Most of my peers who have done a PhD had left if they could. This was 1990s. It’s just getting worse as Australia never made R&D a money making game. If it’s a cost, the logical method is to kerb it. Remember in the USA you have to mortgage your home to pay for private university education if you don’t have a scholarship. Nothing is free.
Have also been through this…it’s a really hard road to become an academic in the pure sciences in Australia. I went to the dark side… industry (just to stay in Aus)
I read this one earlier in the week and thought geez what a waste of money for Australia. Good for the bloke heading overseas but we've missed out here. But then, on the other side of the coin, how many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of migrants have we brought in that has "brain-drained" other countries? A fair bit of laziness from businesses that refuse to spend money investing in people for the long term, and just prefer to bring in temp workers from offshore. Perhaps it all evens itself out. But yeah...we do lack a vibrant scientific community. And the country is poorer for that.
