Income differentials and academic staff attrition in South-South public universities, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper has explored income differentials and academic staff attrition in south-south public universities, Nigeria. Equity theory guided this study. The study used the tracer method of ex-post-facto research design, which surveyed 370 academic staff members who were sampled using multi-stage sampling in a population of 10,570 academics in the region. The questionnaire that was used to gather data was titled Incomes Differentials and Academic Staff Attrition Questionnaire (IDASAQ), which was validated through expert judgement and was further subjected to Cronbach's alpha reliability, and it yielded a coefficient of 0.89. Research questions were analysed using descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, frequencies, and percentages), and the Pearson product-moment correlation hypothesis was used to test the hypothesis at a 0.05 significance level. The results showed that academic staff generally perceive significant income differences between the university sector and comparable roles in other sectors of the economy. Also, it was discovered that the rate of attrition of the academic staff in universities is quite high. Furthermore, the findings showed a significant correlation between the rate of attrition in universities and the perception of income differences among academic staff. Conclusively, the issue of income differentials is one of the biggest challenges to the retention of academic personnel in public universities. It was thus recommended that immediate restructuring of academic salary scales occur to achieve competitiveness with other sectors, along with the institutionalisation of regular salary increments based on inflation indices, the adoption of special retention measures including research allowances and performance-based incentives, and ongoing discussions between the government, university management, and academic unions to develop evidence-based income policies that reconcile fiscal realities with the need to maintain quality academics.