Keeping the Best: Optimal Career Strategies in Academia

Some areas of science face the problem that many people prefer the private sector over academia and so research output is lost. The present paper investigates by means of an optimal control model how the reward of competencies in research and teaching in the private sector affects investments into these skills as well as the decision on whether and when to optimally leave academia. As the decision between academia and industry is obvious if a scientist has strong preference for either, we focus on scenarios where this is not the case. We show that if academic competencies are well rewarded in the private sector, the most competent people will leave academia. We find scenarios in which a scholar will first try to improve his or her skills as much as possible before leaving academia and scenarios in which it is optimal to not put much effort into work and let competencies slowly depreciate before leaving. Even if professors are highly skilled and motivated to stay, if poor working conditions do not support knowledge acquisition, competencies will inevitably fall and academia will only consist of mediocre people in the long run.