STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 5 June 2012

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43. Brain drain in Spain as 1m graduates swell the ranks of the unemployed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/01/europa-brain-drain-spain-graduates


A demonstration by university students in May during national protests against government cuts in education. Photograph: Manu Fernandez/AP

Virginia Hernández and Quico Iñesta packed their suitcases in 2011, as they stood on the threshold of their 30s. "Ours was a double brain drain," she said over the phone. They left behind family and friends, and a decade of education at publicly funded Spanish universities; with them, they took their knowledge, which they now apply in the rainy city of Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland.

The doctor and her husband, a biologist, had been among the almost 1 million graduates swelling the ranks of Spain's unemployed, in country that produces an above-average number of graduates (40% of 25- to 34-year-olds against the European Union average of 34%). There is no official figure for how many of those have left since the crisis began, but various estimates put the number at about 300,000. These are the human face of the "unprecedented flight of talent" to which the employment minister, Fátima Báñez, has referred.

For Hernández, what hurts is the weather. That, and the waste. "It makes no sense to educate us for 11 years and then be unable to offer us anything afterwards," she said. Job security in Scotland and the earnings – £48,000 for her, £32,000 for him – compensate, in part, for the homesickness.

On the Spanish side of the water, the debate goes on. José Luis Alvarez-Sala, dean of medicine at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, is clear: "We are producing more doctors than we can absorb." And every year, about 7,000 more qualify in one or other of Spain's 39 universities of medicine. To train a specialist takes between €60,000 (£48,000) and €70,000. But according to the dean, one in four of those graduates leaves the country to look for work.