On the Salaries of French Researchers

The National Science Foundation isn't getting enough money from the federal government. Americans don't choose science or engineering careers in large enough numbers. American edge in innovation is threatened. Doomsday is coming. With all that hand-wringing, it is helpful to remember that, contrary to other countries, the States pays its academic researchers a very nice amount of money. (By academic researchers, I refer to tenure-track or tenured faculty members at research universities.) I was reminded of that fact when I recently found online the monthly gross salary of researchers at France's flagship institution, CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) - if you know French, the page is here. Researchers at CNRS have typically graduated from one of the prestigious Grandes Ecoles or Ecole Normale Supérieure, and written a doctoral dissertation. Because there is a second, harder doctorate (doctorat d'Etat) one can obtain later, and because scholarships only last three years, the first one only lasts about three to four years, which makes it shorter than PhD programs in the States - nonetheless, these people have done a lot of hard work, and they should make the core of France's strategy in research, development and innovation. Here are the salary ranges they can look forward to throughout their career, per month, before taxes.

• chargé de recherche de 2e classe (starting position) between 2 000 € and 2 600 €. Small apartments in decent neighborhoods in Paris, where the CNRS has most of its labs, have a rent of the order of 1,100 euros, which puts them out of reach of single researchers - and of course of researchers with children too (Using Yahoo! currency converter with today's rate, which is extremely favorable to the euro, this corresponds to a $3,140-4,080 range for their monthly gross pay. On top of it, Americans have a lot less taxes and that most universities are in small towns, or in towns that revolve around the university, which makes for a low cost of living and a high quality of life. For every New York University, you have ten Ohio State, Purdue or Illinois Urbana-Champaign.)
• chargé de recherche de 1e classe (a bit more senior position) between 2 150 € and 3 800 €.
• directeur de recherche (more senior and prestigious position) between 3 000 € and 6 000 € ($4,700-9,406).

This is why researchers often complement their income by teaching a course at one of the Parisian grandes écoles.

As comparison, the starting salary of graduates of the Ecole des Mines de Paris - my alma mater - who chose to work right after getting their "diplôme d'ingénieur" (similar to a M.Eng. degree) was 42,600 euros in France and 52,400 euros abroad in 2006 - see here the document in French. That's 3,550-4,370 euros per month, and the pay increases in industry are also much more substantial. So let me summarize the choice for French college students. Stay in school for three or four years after your "ingénieur" degree and get paid almost half as much as what your classmates got when they started working (don't even think about how much they're getting now), or run away from research as fast as you can.

The only excuse sane French researchers can have for pursuing this line of work is that they didn't know what they were getting themselves into.

Comments

[Rod.]

I thought that French researchers were paid more. Given those miserably low wages, I now understand why my friends who went to École Polytechnique, École Normale Supérieure (and other grand écoles) all left Science. ALL of them. They're in Consulting and Finance now. Those career tracks probably will allow them to pay the rent and have kids before the age of 45.

[FF]

Interesting data! How does it compare with the situation in other European countries, in particular Switzerland?