[rjzzleep]

here's an anecdote from a german communication network professor i was sitting at lunch with.

as comparison, the pay for a professor here is 50k a year, but can be more. you heard that right, that's what a bsc in low pay southern states gets.

he said the following thing which made me rethink the whole thing a little:

"conversely i get to research anything i want to, and i don't have to worry about pleasing business with my research results"

germany though has a big problem of americanization like so many other countries.

i've heard of so many research in the us getting shut down, or the researchers discredited, because they pissed off the wrong company funding the department they were working for.

it's a double edged sword.

EDIT: it's funny this got downvoted. i was personally involved in evaluating software that was written for the DHS by a huge contractor SAIC. they paid 20+ million for that piece of junk, and my supervisor was scared of passing on the assessment, because they were scared we would lose opportunities on further grants(they were impressed by the assessment, apparently we were the only ones that did such a thorough assessment).

i never said professors in germany don't have to get research money or grants, but they are way less dependent on what outcome the industry dictates.

[facepalm]

Does it really work that way? My impression was that professors are constantly trying to raise money from the government. Instead of proving industry value, they have to convince bureaucrats that their ideas are worth pursuing. I think strong cases have been made that that's not the optimal way of allocating money for scientific research. For example: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/05/posi... (government funding is not good in pursuing wild ideas)

[rjzzleep]

german academics get a lot of money from industry too. but the numbers are absolutely not comparable to the numbers in the us.

this is not always the case as you can see from the nepomuk thing[1]

but to further strengthen your point, in europe program code or implementation is not considered research. european scientific funding is reserved for research, so a lot of the research you see will never be turned into viable products. that notion also exists in german universities. universities of applied sciences see this differently, but people sometimes joke that these are not real universities.

a lot of what was turned into money is actually european inventions. most americans, don't even know that europe has a lead in neuroscience research(that includes countries like spain). or at least used to, most americans also don't know how great the cs dpt of the tu wien(vienna) is for example.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework) rdf based semantic metadata thingie with a cost of 17 million that is now being ditched partly because it's rdf

[ThePhysicist]

In fact, the base salary of a full University professor (so-called W3 group) is 5672,13 € per month (http://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besoldungsordnung_W), so in total (with extra 13th salary) 73737 € / year, hence about 101k$ / year. This excludes extra pay for fulfilling faculty functions etc. which can easily double that amount. Take in addition the generous retirement money, the fact that they are state functionaries and thus cannot be fired and do not pay any social security taxes (usually about 15 % of your salary) makes this look pretty good to me. Btw the salaries of older professors (which are still payed according to the old C standard from before 2005) is even higher. Of course there are so-called "Fachhochschulprofessoren" that earn less than this, but since they usually have strong ties with industry and focus on applied research they profit from other income streams.

[angersock]

"conversely i get to research anything i want to" [that there is funding and no competition for].

[anigbrowl]

Is there something missing from this post, like what the German guy is earning? You seem to be making a comparison without one of the comparators.