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Comment by Schlagbohrer | Hacker News Reader

It is driving away mid-career scientists too. France is eagerly recruiting them though and the EU as a whole.

https://www.cnrs.fr/en/update/choose-cnrs-opportunities-scie...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00405-2

EU has much bigger brain drain problems to the US that will not be solved anytime soon. Even just recently Heart Aerospace announced that they were relocating completely to California after several years of warning the EU that the regulatory and economic environment was impossible to navigate for emerging technology companies.

https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/mastering-the-shift-...

A month later they moved to USA

https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...

>As part of this transition and to better focus its resources, Heart has decided to close its operations in Sweden to enable a bigger scale up of the U.S based team.

This is morbid.

The French government may want to invite researchers but it faces budget issues in research and education, and growing social unrest. The French language is also somewhat necessary to live in France. It can be a deterrent.

Eagerly recruiting doesn't translate to active recruitment imo, unfortunately. With the coming elections, it is even more tenuous.

I’m told French schools are particularly bad right now, although I have never seen a reason for why.

French schools K-12 and university do not have better education outcomes than New York state, despite having nearly double the taxes. 53% of New York State residents go to a SUNY university for free and the rest pay a maximum of $7,000 a year on average.

French education budget also accounts for teacher pensions. I don't think that's the case for NY. So it's somewhat apples and oranges.

New York state pays teacher pensions through the New York State Teacher Retirement System. About $8.5 billion a year, ~$4,000/mo per teacher on average. $7,000/mo+ with 30 years of teaching history. It's also protected under the NY State Constitution.

Large cities like Paris and Lyon have a good budget and amenities. You have to go outside the rich centers to see how schools are being failed. You can't look at Louis Le Grand and tell yourself the situation is fine.

Then again that's just what France's like. It's a very Paris-heavy country in many respects.

There are too many countries that speak french for the language to be a deterrent.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine moved to France for a postdoc. Just a few months in, he was informed that while the university would like to keep him, they were not likely to get the money for that.

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