Managing the Socio-Economic Effects of Lecturers Brain Drain for Sustainable University Education in Rivers State

Abstract

Public universities in Nigeria have been confronted by several institutional shocks that have resulted to several lecturers emigrating to other countries. The sustainability of university goals become doubtful given the timeline of the SDGs which emphasizes the need for quality education towards 2030. Four research questions and corresponding hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted descriptive survey design with 3, 806 teaching staff in the public universities in Rivers State constituting the study population out of which 390 respondents (94 females and 296 males) who were sampled using convenience sampling technique. A 30-item questionnaire was deployed for data collection and was face and content validated by experts while the reliability index of 0.89 was estimated using Cronbach Alpha statistics. There were 369 copies of the questionnaire retrieved. The research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation while the hypotheses were tested using z-test at 0.05 level of significance. Social and economic effects of lecturers’ brain drain were identified as well as ways of managing these social and economic effects such as provision of support system and improved budgetary allocation among others. The study recommended the provision of various kinds of allowances such as hazard and performance allowance for lecturers to retain them in the system.