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Where do universities recruit researchers from?
Macháček, Vít ; Srholec, Martin
Where do university researchers come from? How many remain at the same institution where they began doing research? How many have come from elsewhere? Does the tendency to employ researchers originally from the same place markedly differ across universities from different countries? How does this tendency differ between disciplines and over time? From the author affiliations in the Scopus citation database, we found how many researchers are currently based at the same university they were affiliated with at the beginning of their research careers. If their early articles were published under a different organization, we traced whether this was in the same country or abroad. We do not directly measure ‘academic inbreeding’ in the sense of universities hiring their own graduates, because due to differences in publishing practices, a researcher’s early articles may not have been published under his or her alma mater. However, in many disciplines, particularly natural sciences, this is likely to be the case. Our findings are presented for eleven large disciplines and our comparison covers eighteen major universities in fourteen countries, including the new EU member states of the Visegrad group: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. Generalizations are difficult to make, as each discipline looks a bit different. Overall, however, the most inward-looking institutions in employing researchers prove to be the national flagship universities in the Visegrad countries. In contrast, hiring researchers originally from outside is most prevalent in the leading universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as Princeton and Oxford. The Visegrad universities appear to be similar in their tendency to employ researchers originally from the same university to KU Leuven, the University of Vienna and Lund University in many disciplines. The main dividing line does not seem to follow the traditional ‘East vs. West’ differences, but rather tends to highlight the gap between the institutions at the top of global university rankings and the rest. Not surprisingly, the flipside of employing researchers whose research careers began at the same university is low internationalization. Cosmopolitan universities in smaller countries have the highest shares of researchers with foreign’ origins, particularly ETH Zürich, which contrasts with a strong national focus in universities in the Visegrad countries. This analysis is original and its results are not available elsewhere. The findings should be of interest not only to research managers, academics and doctoral students who are based at the universities in the study, but also to policy-makers and the broader public. Human resources management issues tend to be often underrated in research evaluations, although they are a key factor in the development of universities.
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The high costs of low literacy in the Czech Republic
Krajčová, Jana ; Münich, Daniel
By means of projections, we quantify the hypothetical impact of providing better education to insufficiently literate fifteen-year-old pupils on the Czech economy’s long-term growth in the coming decades, using a number of scenarios. Our projections are not predictions of future trends, but represent hypothetical projections of future trajectories based on what is currently known about the causal relationships between educational achievements and economic growth. Insufficiently literate fifteen-year-olds – those who do not achieve score enough in functional literacy tests – face substantial economic and social difficulties later in life. Across the OECD countries, 24% of pupils fall into this category. In the Czech Republic the proportion is slightly lower (21%), and this represents some 20 thousand pupils in an age cohort. Only a negligible share of these pupils attend four-year or extended gymnazia (academic upper-secondary schools). These pupils represent about a third in elementary schools, while they represent almost half of vocational / apprenticeship secondary schools (without the Maturita / Abitur school-leaving exam). School closures during the covid-19 era will likely increase unequal access to quality education and thus the proportion of under-literate pupils.
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Grant support and doctoral studies: analysis of the Grant Agency of the Charles University data
Korbel, Václav
Only about half of the doctoral students in the Czech Republic finish their studies. Students have both insufficient financial and non-financial support from universities. One way to support students in their research and studies is through grant competitions. This is the first study in the Czech Republic to study the relationship between grant support of doctoral students and their further studies. Specifically, we study the effect on graduation rate and study length at the Charles University. We analyze the effects for all students aggregately and divided into field sections. The grant agency is divided into field sections based on the field of research (social sciences, natural sciences, and medicine). We use data from the Grant Agency of Charles University from 2010 to 2013. One third to half of the doctoral students apply for grant support during their studies. Only one third of projects are supported. We match similar students with and without grant support in the analysis. We use matching procedure, which searches for similar students, who received grant support, and students, who applied but did not receive grant support based on their characteristics and their research project characteristics. Our empirical strategy does not guarantee to estimate the causal impact. We interpret our results as a non-causal relationship of grant support on further studies of doctoral students.
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Pension savings schemes with state contributions in the Czech Republic: a prop rather than a pillar
Šatava, Jiří
The third pillar should appropriately complement the first pillar, which is thecornerstone of the pension system. It should therefore be set up such that the level ofpayments from third pillar savings reflects how great a proportion of people’s netincomes is replaced after retirement by their old age pension from the first pillar. In this study we analyse working people’s savings behaviour dependent on how largea proportion of their net incomes will be replaced, once they retire, by their statepension from the first pillar. The first pillar old-age pension pays out a lowerproportion of incomes for employees with higher salaries and for the self-employedin particular. Payments from third pillar savings should therefore play a larger rolefor these people.
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