I bet this is going to shift because the Russian brain drain is almost complete. Europe did not have to compete yet with the United states because Russia was a single source of the migration of several million highly educated people.

https://publications.atlanticcouncil.org/putin-exodus/

If highly productive people can't keep the fruit of their labor, they'll leave to a place where they can! We have less social programs in the US but the majority of productive people will probably prefer working here since they can take home a significantly higher salary even after taxes.

Not just Europe, have a look at how many top Silicon Valley types went to IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) [1]. Why would you stay in your home country when you can hop on a plane and 10x your salary (not to mention work at the cutting edge of science and engineering, rather than a decade late)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technolog...

Perhaps once the EU pays more than 50% of the salary that is paid in the US to software devs/analysts/etc, we'll see this behavior change.

The state serves a collection of individuals. If a particular individual is underserved, then it is consistent with the purpose of the state to:

1. Celebrate brain drain, because your people are improving their circumstances

2. Quickly move to one-up the U.S. and attract talent back to the EU

Almost no one wants to leave their homeland unless the opportunities elsewhere are significantly better.

> Bsc gets paid by EU taxes, guy ends up teaching in US university or working for US company.

Why would this be a concern? They should be free to go where they want to. Just because university education is publicly funded does not mean that they owe their career success to their national government.

While brain drain is a thing, why do you feel that this is a noteworthy example? The phenomenon clearly predates the EU and for this course in particular, you can get the same thing in universities all over Europe.

One problem I see here is considering it to be wasteful...