Abstract:
University Lecturers migration is known as a type of Brain drain. It can be described
as moving a country's most talented and educated lecturers to other countries. The
migration of university lecturers in a country greatly impacts that country's higher
education and hurts the economic growth of developing economies like Sri Lanka.
The main objective of this paper is to explore the factors affecting the intention of
university lecturers to migrate to Sri Lanka. Primary data collected through direct
personal interviews and online questionnaires were used for the study considering
the convenience of the respondents. Sabaragamuwa University was selected from
other universities using the convenience selection method for this study's collected
sample size of 117 lecturers. A stratified random sampling method was chosen to
reach out to them. This was performed as a factor analysis considering the migration
intention of university lecturers as the dependent variable for the structural equation
model. The Factor analysis revealed the effectiveness of Socio-political push factors
in terms of attitudes & perceived behavioral controls and Socio-political pull factors
on the migration intention of university lecturers in terms of attitude, and subjective
norms of the lecturers in a positive manner. The common impact can be seen in the
case of Economic push factors regarding subjective norms. Economic pull factors
positively influence the migration intention of university lecturers in terms of their
perceived behavioral controls. To stop university lecturers' migration, it is necessary
to apply policies to improve the quality of life of Sri Lankan university lecturers.
