This figure is extracted from the most recent ERC starting grant statistics for 2020, which you can find in full here https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/erc_2020_stg_statistics.pdf. It shows the number of awards per million people for the 21 reported countries and by nationality of the awardees. 1/

For those who don’t know, ERC StG are the top research awards in Europe for early-career researchers. With some caveats, this chart can be interpreted to represent the efficiency of each country university undergraduate programme to produce top young scholars. 2/

As a UK academic, I am shocked to see that the UK is penultimate in the EU, just before Poland (all countries below Poland are not in the EU). Israel is top, though with a poor F/M ratio. All the top EU countries are in Northern Europe, and Switzerland is doing well too. 3/

Among the large countries, Germany is top, followed by Italy. What is particularly surprising is how poorly this correlates with university ranking. The UK is at the top of all rankings by a long mile, yet it is doing very badly by this metric. 4/

Unfortunately, I have no explanation to offer, at least none that makes coherent sense. In my opinion, university is a place where people come to be enthused by scholarship - the most gifted will become scholars themselves. This is somehow not happening 5/end