The rate of staff turnover in public universities: a case study of Makerere University
Abstract
The objective of the study was to establish the rate of staff turnover in public universities by
examining the factors associated with staff attrition in the past years in public University, taking
a case study of Makerere University. Secondary data was acquired from the records office of
Makerere University covering years from 2000 to 2018, a total number of 897 staff left the
university with in this period. The analysis was done using frequency distribution, graphical
presentations of pie charts, Time series using STATA and Moving Averages in EXCEL for
making forecast.
Results show that majority of staff who left were male (73%). Of the staff that left the university
service, 185 were assistant lectures, 85 were associate professors, 9 were honorary lecturers 234
were lectures, 56 were professors, 13 were research fellows 132 were senior lecturers 183 were
teaching assistants. Looking the reason, (3.57%) absconded, (33.44%) had expired contracts,
(5.13%) died, (4.01) were dismissed, (1.78%) retired early, (29.10%) resigned, (20.51%) retired,
(0.78%) were seconded, (1.67%) had their services terminated. The time series analysis show
that there is an increasing trend in the number of academic staff leaving the university, from the
moving averages smoothing and forecast, the number of staff leaving the university is projected
to be; 62.25 in 2019, 66 in 2020, 59 in 2021, and 51 in 2022.
The results indicate that; (1) The University should focus on hiring long term staff, that is to say
staff should be given long term contracts to cub the issue of losing staff because of contract
expiry since the study has shown that most staff have left due to contact expiry (2) Greater
strategy to reduce staff turnover should be laid down and follow up to execute, in order to
mitigate the problem given the projected number of staff leaving the university.