Why Germany’s Academic System Repels Talent

How short contracts, chair power, and missing career paths drive researchers abroad

This is my third piece on the German research system. While each stands on its own, they complement each other. Here are my pieces on Germany’s declining research performance and an overview over the German R&D system.

James Bond and Q in Never Say Never Again (1983) Source

When Quartermaster, or Q, uses a pencil to blow up a moving target in the 1983 James Bond movie Never Say Never Again, Bond quips that you could write a very binding contract with the pen. Q replies: “Yeah, I wish I had a new contract. They slashed my budget, you see. I can’t get spare parts, and when you can, there’s usually some strike that stops delivery. And look at this place: They keep it bloody freezing down here. It wreaks havoc with my sinuses.”

Bond: “We’re both humble servants of the Crown.”

Q: “If the CIA made me an offer, I’d be off like a shot. Unlimited resources, air conditioning, 28 flavours of ice cream in the restaurant.”

Q never defected. German scientists do, though. About one in seven German science students landed graduate or postdoc positions in the United States, and up to a third of them don’t return. So, what structures are important to make an academic career appealing, and why is this not the case in Germany?

We can answer this question with a thought experiment. Imagine you’ve just finished your Bachelor’s degree with honors. Your supervisors say you could make it far, and you have the ambition to become a renowned scientist. What you’re looking for is a path to master your field, ideally by collaborating with the brightest minds at the most high-tech research labs.

You want to graduate with mastery of a research topic that lets you immediately apply for funding to continue your project. But you also want more than a first grant. You want to know that if you spend five years chasing an idea that doesn’t pan out, the system won’t punish you for trying. You want colleagues down the hall working on problems different enough from yours that the conversations surprise you. You want to know that there’s more than one version of success: running your own group is one path, staying close to the bench as a permanent research scientist is another, and spending three years in industry or policy won’t close the door on coming back. And if your work produces something the world can use, you want a share of the value, say, through a patent, a spinout, or a salary that reflects what your research is actually worth. You want 28 different flavors of ice cream.

But the German system will not give you that.

To get a STEM PhD in Germany, you work in a part-time position, receiving 50%-to-75% of a full salary, under a single professor who controls your topic, publications, and contract renewal.

You’ll finish around age 31. Then you will enter the postdoc phase: another four to 10 years of fixed-term contracts averaging roughly 30 months, still under somebody else’s authority, still without your own budget, still without the right to hire anyone.

If you’re exceptional (and lucky), you land an Emmy Noether grant or a Max Planck Research Group Leader position, programs that genuinely deliver independence with real money. About 80 Emmy Noethers and 10 to 15 MPRGs are awarded per year. For context, that is 0.3% of all 28,000 German PhDs annually. If you’re on the regular path, you write a Habilitation, a second thesis that can take half a decade and exists almost nowhere else in the world. If you’re on the newer path, you compete for a comparatively small number of junior and tenure-track professorships. In 2022, the average age at first appointment was 35.8 for junior professors (think: assistant professor on predominantly fixed-term), 42.2 for W2 professors (associate professor), and 43.6 for W3 professors (full/chair). In other words, Germany has created an earlier path to independence, but almost all permanent professorial appointments still come only in a person’s early forties.

In the United States, the ladder is broader and opens earlier. A strong young scientist can become an assistant professor, permanent staff scientist, or independent group leader in their thirties, and many research institutions offer stable non-professorial careers for people who want to stay close to the bench. In Germany, by contrast, permanence is concentrated overwhelmingly at the professorial level, meaning that independence and job security tend to arrive later and affect far fewer people.

Meanwhile, breakthrough science is getting harder to do while young. Ben Jones and Bruce Weinberg studied 525 Nobel laureates and found that the peak age for prizewinning discoveries has been rising over the past century, driven by what Jones calls the “burden of knowledge”: each generation must learn more before it can push the frontier further. The peak now falls between 35 and 39. The German system hands researchers the keys to their own lab at 42.5 on average. And the professorship is the only destination. Below it, there is nothing permanent. Eighty percent of academic staff at German universities, such as postdocs, lab assistants, PhD students, and staff researchers, belong to the so-called Mittelbau, a workforce with virtually no long-term career prospects. Staff scientist positions, common at American national laboratories and at places like the Weizmann Institute in Israel, are rare. Research engineer tracks, permanent lab manager roles, senior data scientists with their own career ladders – the kind of infrastructure positions that modern team science depends on – are either temporary or absent.

The law that governs all of this is the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (Germans love their word salads), or WissZeitVG. It permits fixed-term contracts for up to six years before and six years after the doctorate. After twelve years, you either hold a professorship or you leave publicly funded science. A loophole allows additional temporary contracts when paid from third-party grants, which means the clock can be extended, but the insecurity never ends. Ninety-six percent of early-career researchers at German universities work on temporary contracts. The average duration is 20 months. More than 40% are shorter than a year.

The public outcry that should have changed things

In June 2021, the Federal Ministry of Education published an animated video explaining this system. In the video, a cartoon researcher named “Hanna” is told that temporary contracts prevent the system from being “clogged up.” Thousands of real researchers responded on Twitter under #IchBinHanna (“I am Hanna”) with stories of serial short-term contracts, postponed families, and careers abandoned in their late thirties. The ministry deleted the video. A reform bill was drafted in 2024, but the coalition collapsed. As of early 2026, the law is unchanged. The new government has promised reform by mid-2026. No reform has been publicly discussed as of spring 2026, but one massive improvement was already introduced in 2025.

A screenshot depicting Hanna from the ministerial campaign, explaining the alleged benefits of temporary contracts in science. Source

The Wissenschaftsrat, Germany’s most important science advisory body, published a landmark paper in July 2025 proposing a new academic career framework organized into four levels with permanent positions at every level. The model is intended to create clearer, more standardized career paths across the research system while also reducing the current overreliance on temporary positions below the professorial level. This would massively improve career prospects and give young academics the security to build both a career and a life outside academia, without the fear of unemployment or frequent relocation.

This is a good reform and should be implemented. But it doesn’t go far enough.

The deeper structural problem is the Lehrstuhl. In the German chair system, a single professor exercises extraordinary control over a group’s hiring, topics, publication strategy, and contract renewals. Research has shown that when dominant scientists die unexpectedly, their fields often become more dynamic: newcomers enter, import ideas from outside, and produce disproportionately high-impact work. I am not proposing a mortality-based reform agenda. But the facts of the matter suggest that scientific progress benefits when intellectual authority is less centralized. The Lehrstuhl system is structured in a way that makes even excellent mentors into gatekeepers.

Then there’s the question of movement. Germany operates four major non-university research organizations alongside its universities: Max Planck for basic research, Helmholtz for research requiring large-scale infrastructure like particle accelerators or quantum computers, Fraunhofer for applied research, and Leibniz for a broad mix. Together, they employ over 100,000 researchers. On paper, this looks like a rich ecosystem with multiple career options. In practice, the pillars barely talk to each other. Each operates on a different pay scale. Each has its own contract framework, its own evaluation culture, its own hiring processes. Joint appointments exist at the director level but almost nowhere below it. Moving to industry is treated as an exit, not a rotation. Hiring committees for professorships penalize time spent outside academia as a gap in the publication record rather than a qualification. A researcher who spends three years at Bosch developing battery technology returns to find the door is locked.

The cumulative effect of all this is a system that selects for conformity. When your contract lasts 20 months, you cannot spend two years on an experiment that might not work. When your career depends on one professor’s assessment, you do not challenge their paradigm. When your next grant application will be judged by reviewers who, according to DFG data, rate 70% of proposals as equally meritorious and flip their decisions 25% of the time on re-review, you write the safest proposal you can. The Harnack Principle, Max Planck’s founding philosophy of backing brilliant individuals with resources and freedom, tolerates productive failure beautifully. It also serves only 300 directors. Everyone else operates under conditions that make risk-taking career suicide.

None of this means the German system sucks per se. The education of aspiring engineers and scientists is still top-notch. Best practices for careers in science are there, though, concentrated in structures that serve a tiny minority. The Harnack Principle works. The strongest evidence comes from a study by Azoulay and colleagues, who found that HHMI investigators, who receive long-term, people-based funding with unusual freedom to change course, produced 96% more papers in the top percentile of citations than comparable control scientists. They also pursued more novel lines of inquiry and published 35% more “flops” by the paper’s citation-based measure of failure: more swings, more misses, more home runs. Max Planck’s director model is functionally the same philosophy, arguably more radical because the appointments are permanent rather than renewable. It has produced 31 Nobel Prizes. But 300 people out of 100,000 benefit from it.

The shadow side of this concentrated authority surfaced publicly in March 2025, when Deutsche Welle and Der Spiegel investigated the Max Planck Society. They interviewed more than 30 young scientists, many of whom described abusive behavior and toxic work cultures under senior staff, alongside a climate in which those who tried to report misconduct were actively discouraged from doing so. International researchers, women, and scientists of color were disproportionately affected. One of the few willing to speak on the record, Brazilian theoretical physicist Gabriel Lando, described his former director at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden banging the table, shouting, and calling him “f***ing useless” across months of meetings. This, too, is what happens when you concentrate extraordinary authority in a few hundred directors while leaving the tens of thousands below them on 20-month contracts with no realistic exit.

Germany has tried to fix this before. Every attempt follows the same arc: an ambitious federal proposal, resistance from federal states, universities, or incumbents, a constitutional or political obstacle, diluted implementation, and an average age at first professorship that barely changes. In 2002, Education Minister Edelgard Bulmahn introduced the junior professorship to replace the Habilitation and give researchers independence in their early thirties. The highest court ruled it unconstitutional in 2004 because the federal government cannot prescribe career paths to the federal states. The junior professorship survived as an option rather than a replacement, and most holders continued to write their Habilitation on the side, thereby defeating the purpose entirely. In 2017, another reform created 1,000 tenure-track professorships, with federal funding totaling 1 billion euros. Genuinely positive results: a quarter of hires came from abroad, and nearly half of the new positions went to women. But 1,000 positions over 15 years equals 67 per year for 28,000 new PhDs. In 2023, the national education ministry proposed reducing the maximum postdoc term from six years to three. The public backlash of staff already struggling to plan their lives around fixed contracts was so fierce that the ministry withdrew the proposal within 51 hours. The revised bill, a “4+2 model” requiring binding employment commitments after four years, spent nine months stuck in inter-ministerial coordination and reached the parliament for a first reading in October 2024. The proposal died when the coalition fell apart a month later.

The Wissenschaftsrat’s own analysis of why reforms fail contains a remarkable admission: the current WissZeitVG does not prevent a single permanent contract. Universities choose not to offer them. This means the problem is not only the law, it is also a culture, entrenched in university presidencies and deanships, that treats permanent positions below the professorship as an unaffordable luxury rather than a basic requirement for doing serious science. The law matters as a framework and a signal, but the institutions themselves have to change. So far, they haven’t.

So what could actually work?

The components already exist inside the German system. They just need to be assembled differently and made available to more than a privileged few.

1) Fund more people and fewer projects: Expand programs like the Lise Meitner groups and Emmy Noether to cover thousands rather than hundreds of early-career researchers, targeting scientists two to five years post-PhD with budgets of €300,000 to €500,000 per year and five-year evaluation cycles that reward ambition, not just projects. Jones and Summers calculated that the social return on R&D investment is at least five dollars per dollar spent. Even a wastefully-run portfolio of bets on young researchers would pay for itself many times over.

2) Implement the proposed four-level career system: Create permanent positions at every career level, not just at the professorship level. The cost objection doesn’t hold up because these people are already on the payroll, just on rolling temporary contracts. What changes is the incentive structure. A permanent researcher can invest in long-term projects, maintain institutional memory, and take risks. A researcher on a 20-month contract can do none of those things.

3) Reform the WissZeitVG, but go deeper: Decouple the 12-year clock from third-party-funded positions, require universities to offer permanent contracts or funded transitions after four years of postdoctoral work, and replace the chair system with department structures that distribute authority. While at it, amend the agreement (Pakt für Forschung und Innovation) guaranteeing 3% annual budget growth for all four non-university organizations through 2030, on measurable career-structure reforms. The Pakt delivers roughly €800 million in annual growth. Attach conditions: 30% permanent scientific staff by 2030, a share of growth directed to early-career independence programs, and annual published data on contract durations and career outcomes.

4) Introduce lottery elements for tied proposals: New Zealand, Austria, and Switzerland do this. We should also embed a failure tolerance into every evaluation framework by adding one question: “Did this researcher pursue high-risk questions?”

5) Build a genuine revolving door between sectors, with funded industry sabbaticals and guaranteed return rights, so that three years at Siemens counts as a qualification rather than a career-ending gap.

If this programme was implemented, what would I expect to happen? Scientists will conduct much more high-risk, high-reward research, since their careers won’t end with a failed project. Many scientists leaving Germany will still be tempted by the US infrastructure and salaries. The proposals above might dampen the effect, but won’t nullify it. But what’s also true is that many expats still want to return to Germany and Europe after the peak of their career because of family relations and better living standards. These scientists might return earlier and could mentor the next generation and improve research setups in Germany if they were offered permanent positions without the bureaucratic burdens and power plays that come with a full professorship.

Germany spent €137 billion on research and development in 2024 alone. It employs more than 100,000 researchers across four non-university organizations. It operates some of the most advanced scientific infrastructure in the world, and, at its best, it funds research the way the evidence says research should be funded: through the Max Planck directors, the Emmy Noether laureates, and the Helmholtz Young Investigators. The problem is that the system was designed around institutions, not around the people who do the research. Fixing it requires the willingness to take what already works for a few hundred and make it the default for tens of thousands.