Unlocking Faculty Development Scheme in Higher Education: Utilizing Expatriate Faculty or Reversing Brain-Drain to Brain Gain?

1. Introduction

Since the beginning of Ethiopia’s secular higher education, faculty development has been dominated by expatriate faculty members [1]. Ethiopia’s public Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have experienced rapid expansion since 2007/08, leading to a significant number of expatriate professors from low-cost academic labor markets. This is driven by the outflow of highly skilled compatriots, which has weakened Ethiopia’s intellectual capital. The outflow of local faculty indicates the country’s need to address issues related to intellectual capital. The rapid expansion of HEIs has prompted Ethiopia to seek expatriate faculty members. The question is whether the low-income country’s economy attracts highly skilled expatriates, reverses the brain drain to brain gain, or retains skilled compatriot faculty for Ethiopia’s public universities’ development.

Academics typically understand faculty development in terms of how each faculty member advances their knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and methods connected to teaching in a particular institution using a variety of competency development models [2-4]. For faculty development programs in the HEIs, these writers placed a strong emphasis on online learning, cooperative coursework design, seminars, workshops, evaluation, mentoring, coaching, and action learning. I agree with the mentioned best practices in professional development support to train faculty members to evolve in academic working roles such as teaching, research, community services, supervision, and academic governance when needed. However, faculty development comes after recruiting, selecting, and hiring faculty members. Accordingly, Mekuria [5] emphasized first the quality of faculty recruitment and selection processes to effectively evolve the faculty members in academic working roles in the HEI context.

In this regard, Mekuria [5] defined leadership development policy dimensions as the legitimate standard criteria used to recruit, select, develop, and retain academic leaders in public universities. It is widely known that faculty members have academic leading, teaching, supervising, and community service-providing roles. In addition, the focus of every one of the training schedules is to link these academic working roles with the institutional goals. In the sense of development, achieving institutional goals requires members’ commitment that can be gained through subsuming the trust of individuals into the trust of the entire institutional members. Thus, effective faculty development should begin with the quality of recruiting, selecting, and hiring processes to advance the entire faculty members discharging their roles towards institutional goals.

In this regard, recruiting and selecting highly skilled faculty members from the academic labor market is crucial but a deep-rooted challenge for developing countries in Africa, including Ethiopia [6-9]. After World War II, the developed countries set strategies that attract highly skilled scholars from devolving countries; Ethiopia is one of the victims of a drained brain [7,9]. On the other hand, the developing countries themselves, such as Ethiopia, pushed out their highly skilled academics for several reasons, such as sheer politics, high pay gaps, unfavorable working conditions, a lack of respect for professions, and a fear of war risk [7,10]. Nevertheless, the consequences of the highly skilled migration to North America and Europe let the country expatriate faculty seekers.

The history of the utility of expatriate faculty in Ethiopia’s public HEIs seems to have started with the establishment of public HEIs. As evidenced, even expatriate faculty members have served in the top public university leadership positions since the inauguration of Haile Selassie I University (HSIU) in 1961. During the inauguration, the governor appointed Dr. Harold W. Bentley (an associate professor) as academic vice president and Dr. Kenneth M. Montgomery as vice president for administration and business development [11]. Later, the state assigned Dr. Harold W. Bentley as acting president of HSIU for a temporary period until the appointment of Kassa Woldemariam in 1962 as the first domestic president of HSIU [11].

In the emergence of HSIU, expatriate faculty were involved from a top managerial position to coordinating and leading classroom instruction, in which the leadership approach seemed to follow American university styles until the “Derg” regime took power in 1974. The massacre and its impacts appeared during the “Derg” regime, expected as a pushing factor to repatriate overseas academics and to push out highly skilled internal academics to high-income countries. Maybe for compensation, the military junta (Derg) imported overseas academics from socialist countries, which promoted the military junta’s ideology at the time. As the military junta was overthrown and the newly emerged gorilla-type military junta took the power position, importing overseas academics changed from parts of socialist countries to other emerging countries such as India, the Philippines, Germany, Korea, and some others.

In the public universities of Ethiopia, the demand for expatriate faculty in the engineering and natural sciences streams is still growing. The practice of hiring expatriate academics appears to be a well-noticed global phenomenon, and no country survives solely on its local academic resources. The highly skilled African workforce relocated to Western Europe and Northern America, where academic incomes and other conditions such as academic liberty and social fairness were more appealing [6,7,12]. For these scholars, a small number of European academic members travel to African countries. In contrast, a large number of highly skilled African teachers relocated to Europe and North America for better salaries.

Long ago, even the United Kingdom was one of the countries that suffered from brain drain, in which its scientists, engineers, and other professionals migrated to the United States of America and Canada in the early 1960th [6,9]. Accordingly, the crisis of brain drain in one way and utility expatriate academics in the other way, experienced in both developed and developing countries. Nevertheless, because of the economic capacity, the problem of holding highly skilled academics is severing for developing countries compared to developed countries [6-9].

In the history of expatriate faculty utility in Ethiopia, massive complaints against the performance of faculty members have not yet been publicly documented during the Emperor and Derg regimes. However, in Ethiopia, some complaints frequently questioned the quality of expatriate faculty in one way and the quality of expatriation processes in the other way [13]. The complaints about expatriate faculty employment practices have been visible in the near past, as of 2007/08, just when the government fired eminent compatriot academics because of sheer politics and when it launched thirteen public HEIs at the same time in Ethiopia. At this time, the government hired not only faculty members but also chief executive officers (CEOs) [13]. Nevertheless, the strong complaints were widely noticeable in the public HEI students and faculty meetings in which the aim was to advocate the intention of the government’s overall policy dimensions. Furthermore, my experience as a member of an ad hoc committee to analyze the continuing expatriation process and provide internal directives to renew contract agreements for expatriate faculty members fueled my desire to focus on expatriation concerns.

In addition, the study that reports on the perceived leadership effectiveness of expatriate CEOs at Adama Science and Technology University (ASTU) and Mekele University (MU) was partly effective and grounded in discriminatory issues [13]. This again pushed me to further investigate if the country’s faculty employment policy dimensions protect homegrown faculty employment in Ethiopia. Besides, I examined if the country can attract a highly skilled diaspora for the benefit of faculty development within the country. This was because the UNDP proposed the transfer of knowledge through the Expatriate Nations (TOKTEN) program in 1977 [14]. In this program, African countries such as Rwanda (2005–2007) and Asian countries such as Sri Lanka utilized the TOKTEN project for three weeks to three months. However, scholars have reported that the evaluation of the project’s performance was unsatisfactory. All the same, some scholars have capitalized on the fact that on the fact that reversing brain drain to brain gain is advantageous for faculty development in Africa, including Ethiopia [6-9].

In this wisdom, systematically attracting highly skilled expatriate faculty and reversing the brain drain to brain gain is useful for the development of faculty members in Ethiopia’s public universities. However, which options sustainably support faculty development is unknown in Ethiopia’s public universities. In the study, I purposefully selected two public universities, AMU and ASTU, as the target data sources from Ethiopia’s public universities. AMU is my home university, where I have been working as a faculty member with expatriate faculty members, whereas ASTU is a technology university, where I have been working part-time with expatriate faculty members. Further, I intended to analyze the contributions of ongoing expatriate faculty compared to homegrown faculty to faculty development in the study area context. Therefore, I designed the following research questions to gather in-depth qualitative data from a sample of public universities in Ethiopia.

To what extent do the trends in legislative faculty employment policies protect the employment rights of compatriots’ faculty?

Which policy option best supports faculty development at Ethiopia’s public HEIs: maximizing the use of expatriate faculty or reversing the brain drain to brain gain?

In favor of this analysis, I used the higher education legislative policy dimensions, supportive legal documents, and empirical studies as secondary sources of data; whereas the interviews and participant observations as primary data sources. In this regard, I employed the combined information of secondary and primary data sources to investigate the strategic policy for faculty development strategies in Ethiopia’s public university context. Accordingly, the major policy analysis topic in a developing nation setting is which aspects best assist faculty development: acquiring competent expatriate staff, converting brain drain to brain gain, or retaining homegrown faculty within the country.

Conceptual Framework: Policy analysis has modern theoretical frameworks [15]. To build a conceptual framework for examining faculty development policies from 1962 to the present, we applied the theoretical framework of narrative policy analysis. This method looked at the recruitment, selection, development, and retaining legal patterns for faculty at Ethiopia’s public universities. Recently, narrative policy analysis frameworks (NPF) have been identified in the literature as one of the novel policy analysis theories [15,16]. Despite the wide variety of theories surrounding policy analysis, the NPF opted to focus on the policy components of faculty development within the framework of Ethiopia’s public universities. This is because the narrative descriptions made use of historical recollections, individual and institutional life experiences, and cases [17]. In this concern, the framework helps to examine if unlocking faculty development options helps to attract highly qualified professors from the internal and global academic labor markets.

2. Method and Procedures

In this policy analysis, the qualitative approach of NPF was used to analyze how the policy dimensions support the development of faculty within HEIs. The narrative investigation is a strategy of inquiry in which the researcher studies the lives of individuals and asks one or more individuals to provide stories about their lives [17]. Besides, the narrative analysis extends the idea of text to include in-depth interview transcripts, life history transcripts, life history narratives, historical memories, lived experiences, and creative notifications [17]. Moreover, the NPF theoretical conceptions of policy theory analysis better help to interpret contextual stories to understand how the policy dimensions contribute to the development of the faculty of public HEIs using primary and secondary qualitative information.

Taking Arba Minch University (AMU) and Adama Science and Technology University (ASTU) as data sources, qualitative data was collected through participative observations, legal documents, and semi-structured in-depth interview methods. The interviewees (14) were drawn purposefully from ASTU and AMU, which hold academic officer positions ranging from department chairpersons to scientific directors who are responsible for managing faculty development within the institutions. In addition, graduate students (3) and expatriate faculty members (3) also participated to triangulate and complement the collected information from academic officers. In general, 20 interviewees participated in providing data about faculty development options and the management practices concerning faculty development concerning expatriate and compatriot faculty. In addition to the information obtained through interviews and participatory observation methods, I employed legal documents and empirical evidence to verify if the policy dimensions support the ongoing faculty development practices in Ethiopia’s public universities.

To gather data, a semi-structured interview protocol was established. The semi-structured interview tool includes questions about “how and on what” faculty recruiting, selection, development, and retention were handled at the two sample universities. The data gathered from the two samples of public universities logically reflect the issues of the other public universities established by the same higher education policy and government finance in Ethiopia. In this insight, the data acquired from interviews was organized from numerous codes into a few codes, which are then grouped under the themes of faculty development alternatives (ex-pats, diaspora, compatriots) from recruiting, selecting, developing, and retaining conditions.

3. Results and Discussions

A. Trends of faculty employment in Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, Emperor H/Selassie established the pioneer public university college in Addis Ababa in [18], in which 75% of the faculty members were expatriates from Western countries [1]. According to the UNESCO assessment, the share of expatriate faculty members was lowered to 54% in 1973 during the Emperor government and 21% in 1986/87 during the Derg regime. In these consecutive regimes, the country enacted legislative policy dimensions to guide faculty preparation for its higher education. However, no explicitly defined directions to hire expatriate faculty in its higher education legal documents while utilized from the proportion of 75% in 1961 up to the proportion of 5% in 2018 [1,19].

The Emperor H/Selassie regime was overthrown in 1974 by a partially organized military junta named ‘Derg.’ Derg was popularly known as a dictatorship, which later rose to power with the ideology of unsure socialism, and the implications of ideological change drove out highly trained expatriate and local academic members. Although the Derg administration has less influence over higher education academic activity, the academic governance structure has been dominated by politically injected persons who speak as if socialism is their favored ideology. The then-disseminated ideology and the changing situations around them were the causes that pushed the highly skilled expatriate faculty members back home. Instead, the Eastern socialist countries supported the faculty members as a temporary base to re-capacitate faculty development in Ethiopia’s public HEI context.

Nevertheless, the Derg regime had enacted the Higher Education Commission’s Proclamation No. 109/1977 [20], in which its Article 10 (2) declared about faculty employment. Employees of state HEIs are public servants. They shall, however, be governed by regulations issued by the Commission, and shall be in line with public service principles specified in the Central Personnel Agency and public service laws [20]. In the same document, Article 10(1), however, the then government enacted that “The Labor Proclamation No. 64 of 1975 shall not apply to state HEIs.”

As noticed in the legal document, faculty employment during the Derg regime was guided by the higher education commission regulations that shared the principles of public service employment but not the principles of labor employment laws. According to Proclamation No. 109/1977 [20], I was considering that Labor Proclamation No. 64/1975 was not to be applied to Ethiopia’s state HEIs. Nevertheless, there were no declarations of the work permit for foreign citizens in the higher education proclamation, in both the labor and civil service proclamations. Therefore, how the country employed expatriate faculty members for its public HEIs was the main concern of the present policy analysis on faculty development.

Next, during the downfall of the Derg regime, another ‘Gorilla-type military junta’ took over the governing power of the country in 1991. After some years of the Gorilla-type military junta over through the Derg regime, the transition government declared the 1994 education and training policy. They further declared their HE proclamations in 2003 and further approved them in 2009, with a minor change in faculty development. The political power of the gorilla fighter military junta team members continued until 2018. As of 2018 until now, their replicate party members have come to power and are still governing the country without major ideological change. Nevertheless, there were structural change attempts in the area of primary and secondary school subsystems, whereas the existing team declared an ongoing HE proclamation in 2019 with minor changes to faculty development compared to the aforementioned proclamations. The enacted HE proclamations provide insights into hiring and developing faculty members, whereas none of the HE proclamations declare about expatriate faculty recruiting, selecting, developing, or repatriation procedures.

The HE Proclamation No. 351/2003 [21] addressed the faculty development dimensions. Article 7 (a) of this document focuses on institutional autonomy in managing academic staff, including employment. Furthermore, Article 23 (1-2) announced academic staff roles, ranks, and tenure; Article 24 (1-4) proclaimed joint appointment of academic staff; and Articles 37 (9) and 40 (8) declared the advisory board’s duty and responsibility for academic staff employment. In this regard, Proclamation No. 351/2003 [21] outperformed Proclamation No. 109/1977 [20] in describing the roles, duties, and responsibilities of faculty employers and employees; however, the two legal documents did not address the management of the expatriation processes for its public universities.

In the same vein, the country issued HE Proclamation No. 650/2009 [22], to implement business process reengineering (BPR) in its HEIs. In terms of faculty development, this proclamation was almost identical to the previous HE Proclamation No. 351/2003 [21]. Proclamation No. 650/2009 [22] ideally added compensation for top academic officers but interpreted it in practice. As well, the proclamation provided the Senate’s mandate on hiring professors for its public HEIs. Further, the proclamation granted the president the power to fill employment and official positions through competition and remove them based on performance evaluation, disciplinary matters, and term-end.

Following the governor’s political system’s modest adjustment, newly elected officials issued HE Proclamation No. 1152/2019 [23]. As a consequence, articles 30 (1-4) declared academic staff employment; 33 (1-3) declared employment tenure and extensions of academic staff retirement age; and 34 (1-5) declared the joint appointment of academic staff for Ethiopia’s public universities. There were also adjustments in resource utilization in this document, while the essential challenges of faculty development remained consistent with the aforementioned laws.

Subsequently, the current HE legislative policy dimensions have guided better than the former HE proclamations, whereas none of these legal documents incorporated the rules that help public universities hire and manage expatriate faculty. However, the expatriate faculty members’ proportions were higher during the Emperor regime (75%–54%) compared to the two consecutive regimes (21%–5.6%), as presented in Figure 1. Then, in Ethiopia, how the public universities legitimately managed the faculty and expatriation process was a remarkable point of policy analysis in this study. Moreover, academic staff development legislative policy dimensions vested the authority of faculty employment with the institutions.

Although these legal documents vested the authority of faculty employment to the institutions without differentiating employment advantages by citizens, the payment guidelines were and are discriminatory, which sidesteps the homegrown faculty as compared to expatriate faculty in the same competencies. In any case, Ethiopia’s public HEIs have been granted the mandate to hire expatriate faculty members following the directives produced by Ethiopia’s MoE since 2008 [24].

The MoE further updated the directive over time and declared the ongoing expatriate faculty salary scales in 2019. However, the suggested compensation packages for expatriate teachers have no prospect of employing highly skilled members of the Diaspora or compatriot faculty of Ethiopian descent. Consequently, the main issue under investigation was whether these significant salary differences between Ethiopian-origin faculty members (even highly skilled Diaspora) and foreign faculty with equivalent academic competency established faculty development at the nation’s public HEIs.

As presented in Figure 1, the proportions of expatriate faculty were further reduced to 6.8% in 2000/01, 9.3% in 2006/07, and 8.4% in 2012/13 in this regime in Ethiopia [25-27]. More importantly, this regime has launched the country’s six Education Sector Development Programs (ESDP) (I–VI), of which ESDP–IV set a target to limit the proportion of expatriate faculty to 3% by 2014–15 [28]. Conversely, the intended strategy to limit the proportion of expatriate faculty to 3% was not possible by the target year in its public HEIs [29]. Rather, the ESDP-V has set a remarkable strategy to change the mix of faculty qualifications (bachelor, master, and doctorate holders) from (27:58:15) in 2015 to (0:70:30) in 2019. The situation further informs the need for 15% of Ph.D. faculty demand for its public HEIs from internal and external sources. Nevertheless, in contrast to the ESDP-V, the ESDP-VI has given faculty development initiatives and expatriation circumstances less consideration, with a minimal emphasis on the progress of higher education [29,30].

As presented in Figure 1, the expatriate faculty members’ proportion was reported at 5.6% in 2017/18 in Ethiopia’s public universities. However, the intended expatriate faculty reduction of 3% for the 2015 target year was not successful even in 2017/18 [19]. Moreover, the country could not fulfill its public HEIs through internal, highly skilled faculty resources. Moreover, whether the anticipated faculty qualification mix (0:70:30) for the 2019 target set has been fulfilled using internal, highly skilled faculty resources is unknown.

Furthermore, the country lost its homegrown, highly skilled resources because of sheer political pressure in the country [31]. As the former studies noticed, the highly skilled local faculty members who graduated from the universities of Western countries migrated abroad. The majority of the highly skilled Ethiopian citizens who migrated still served as distinguished professors in the universities of Western countries, whereas their public universities still seek highly skilled faculty from the low-cost academic labor market. Nevertheless, the highly skilled faculty could not identify with the lower-cost academic labor market, and the country could not afford to pay salaries for the competent expatriate faculty in line with the timely academic labor market around the globe.

Because of the institutional autonomy, each of the public HEIs developed its legislation and other institutional regulatory directives that specifically guide the employment of academic staff in line with the enacted HE proclamations. This is because the formulated institutional-level legal documents would be effective if and only if the contents of the legislation, directives, and regulations argue with the HE proclamations. Because the mentioned proclamation No. 650/2009 [22] declared that “no law, regulations, directives, or practices shall, in so far as they are inconsistent with the provisions of this proclamation, have effect concerning matters provided for by this proclamation” [22]. At the then time, there was no explicit policy for expatriate faculty employment in the entire governor’s regime (Emperor, Derg, and existing regimes) in Ethiopia. However, there were directive guidelines from the [24], and its updated version is currently utilized to employ and manage expatriate faculty.

On the other hand, the former labor proclamation No.377/2003 [32] had declared it better to specify the work permit dimensions of expatriates and the responsibilities and management of expatriate employees. According to FDRE labor proclamation No. 377/2003 [32], Article 174 (1), and the new labor proclamation No.1156/2019, Article 16 (1), about the work permits of foreign nationals: “Any foreigner may only be employed in any type of work in Ethiopia where he possesses a work permit given to him by the ministry.”

In addition, the former FDRE civil service proclamation No. 515/2007 [33], Article 22(2), affirmed temporary employment of a foreign nationality that declared as follows:

A government office may appoint a foreign national temporarily, where it is proved that it is impossible to fill a vacant position that requires a high-level professional by an Ethiopian through promotion, transfer, or recruitment.

Nonetheless, the practicality of the civil service laws to hire expatriate faculty. Moreover, Ethiopia’s delegated employers gave little attention to the MoE [24] instruction, or the guideline may have been shelved, rather than used to oversee the expatriation process at the departmental level. These occurred because the delegated employers witnessed that majority of have not trained to manage expatriate employment. They handle the expatriation process using little oral orientation or common sense.

Furthermore, the interviewees argued that the training opportunity had not yet provided them with the possibility to manage expatriation processes in the target public HEI’s top echelons. They handle expatriate faculty in a more traditional manner, similar to that of domestic teachers. However, the contract argument for domestic and expatriate academics differed. In this concern, the scholars anticipated that the notion of expatriation processes that help to manage the recruiting, selecting, developing, and repatriating processes [34,35] was partly employed or ignored.

Moreover, the evidence from the interviews and observations corroborated the process of faculty expatriation, especially in light of the murky academic labor market where there are rumors of corruption and falsified documentation. One of the faculty members who participated in this category’s interviews inquired about rumors of corruption in the country’s academic job market. In his response, he used a comparative perspective, noting that the issue at hand is global and goes as follows:

An international problem that impacts academic institutions is corruption in the academic labor market. In many nations, doctoral candidates frequently complete additional MA or MSc degrees in two to three academic years, unlike elite universities where Ph.D. programs take five years or longer. These universities give their highly qualified graduates access to higher-paying colleges in North America and Europe, making them competitive in the global academic labor market. Employers must draw in highly qualified instructors from the competitive academic labor pool.

The professor outlined the fundamental issue with the state of the academic labor market in a worldwide setting, as shown in the coded language. For the professor, the nation’s economic capacity and the caliber of employers dictate which draws highly qualified and academically competitive faculty from the global academic labor market. This implies that under qualified academic staff members and financial hardships may constrain to recruitment of highly qualified faculty. However, even some of the expatriate professors reflected that the ongoing faculty expatriation processes are guided by labor market brokers and lead to corruption. For these participants, the brokers are strong enough to influence the academic labor market.

It was also the belief of the majority of interviewees that the ongoing practices of the faculty expatriation process in Ethiopia failed to attract competent expatriate faculty from the academic labor market. As some of the expatriate interviewees viewed it, Ethiopia’s choice to educate its university students was the cheapest academic terrain. Accordingly, the former and the current policy dimensions of faculty development options, which were categorized as graduate preparation for Ethiopia’s overseas and the use of expatriate academics [36] World Bank, 2003 seem at risk of quality. On the other hand, quality is one of the core policy values in education worldwide [37].

Moreover, the domestic interviewees commonly argued against the moral and ethical considerations of some of the expatriate faculty at ASTU and AMU, particularly in evaluating students, which had a severe impact on the quality of education. In ethical and moral considerations, there was hearsay about expatriate faculty members who lacked competent knowledge and skills in handling students’ aggression by providing higher achievement scores, such as “B” and above letter marks. Such unethical grading diminished the quality of education in higher education.

Students have expressed concerns about unethical performance evaluations, with some observing acceptance as the norm and others fearing payback for reporting unethical conditions. Officials have been accused of misjudging expatriate faculty, including sexual harassment. Female students’ reflections show that most expatriate faculty members and compatriot faculty members are not suspected of sexual harassment or intimidation by holding up achievement scores or exam papers. However, some young expatriate faculty members have been alleged sexual harassers and intimidators by grades. One example is a sexual harasser who was deported but later found another employment opportunity due to a bad connection in the university’s network. Other reasons for hiring foreign academics include employers’ constraints in hiring and choosing foreign faculty or rumors of corruption in the hiring process. Overall, the issue of unethical performance evaluations remains a concern for students and academics alike.

To identify faculty expatriation core issues in the study area, most interviewees believed that qualified foreign professors could not be produced in a low-cost academic labor market. For instance, they reflected that in some of the countries, their universities paid USD 5,000 for their skilled teachers. In contrast, Ethiopia’s public HEIs paid foreign teachers within the salary range of $1400 to USD 3500, plus an extra $175 to USD 275 for housing allowance and other expatriation-related costs. In contrast, the nation paid its professors less than USD 400, more than eight times the income of an expat with the same level of expertise. Therefore, the policy aspects of Ethiopia’s still-existing public HEIs help to some extent with the advancement of faculty development, using foreign faculty or native, highly qualified residents.

B. Expatriate faculty Vs Reversing brain drain

Ethiopia is known for having a highly skilled medical diaspora [31] but as the nation’s investment policy commencement aspects demonstrate, there was no discernible strategic design that could turn brain drain into brain gain through faculty employment. In this regard, one of the fellow faculty members expressed his opinions as follows:

Expatriate faculty members may come to Ethiopia with their knowledge and sell it temporarily, whereas the national-origin expatriate faculty members may come to Ethiopia not only with their knowledge but also with their heart. He may sell his expertise like others do, but his heart remains in the country.

Examine the interviewee’s opinions about the national foreign faculty about those of other foreign faculty members employed in mechanical engineering. This respondent states that native-born people make a much greater contribution to the development of the teaching workforce in the country than other immigrant laborers who work for compensation or better career opportunities. The interviewee made a fascinating observation: the original talented Diaspora never forgot their home country and always wished to contribute to its prosperity and wisdom. The perspective of the aforementioned interviewee has cast doubt on the unique opinions of the other interviewees, including the worldwide faculty members. Additionally, it was discovered that the idea of drawing in national expatriate faculty as having better opportunities than hiring foreign faculty aligned with the reviewed literature on African drain brain conditions, which included Ethiopia [6,8,12,13,31].

According to the 2019 updated expatriate employment and management guideline of the MoE, Ethiopia, as of November 2019, state that Ethiopia has updated its salary range for foreign faculty members by academic disciplines for professors (1820–4550 USD), associate professors (1690–3900 USD), assistant professors (1560–3260 USD), and lecturers (1300–2860 USD). The majority of the interviewees in this area had the opinion that the nation’s faculty pay range was insufficient to draw qualified foreign academics from the global academic labor market. Rather, because of the social advantages achieved in emerging nations, it draws a sizable number of highly educated or competent Diaspora from the original people who were working abroad and yearning to work at home. As supportive views, all interviewees, including expatriate faculty, suggested utilizing skilled Diasporas for short or long-time ranges as a better strategy than using expatriate faculty for developing countries such as Ethiopia.

In the higher echelons of ASTU, Korean academics who previously served in academic leadership positions frequently utilized the talented diaspora to attract faculty members of national origin rather than those who are not citizens of other countries. Furthermore, word spread among academic staff members regarding the rapid growth of Chinese, Indian, and Korean populations via the use of highly competent Diasporas with steadfast national allegiances. The information gathered from interviews and observed perspectives aligned with empirical research reports on the utility of African national expatriate faculty, including Ethiopian conditions, without compromising their desire to live in a particular place [6,8,12,13,38].

Moreover, the advantage of attracting Diasporas may be visible immediately in optimizing the inflow rate of foreign currency through remittances or investments. Even beyond the advantages of the ongoing attempts to increase the pace of the inflow of foreign currency, halting the brain drain encourages faculty development that can produce highly skilled human capital and a civilized society that could raise the country’s technological ambitions to unprecedented heights. Achieving the higher-standard creative goal necessarily optimizes the nation’s economic level more than the rate of foreign currency inflow because of talented emigration. Additionally, the authorities justified this by claiming that the skilled diaspora contributes to a lower rate of foreign money influx than the unskilled diaspora. This is because most competent Diaspora ended up living overseas with family [8].

However, in the current Ethiopian environment, it appears that the country’s ongoing expatriation efforts have not been successful in drawing suitable foreign professors from low-cost academic labor market terrain that satisfies the conventional criterion. The traditional criteria for choosing foreign workers—which include a methodical assessment of potential applicants multiple intelligence quotients, learning and thinking styles, and the particulars of the expatriate assignment—are either hardly followed or not utilized at all []. Using the aforementioned screening criteria might be feasible if and only if the nation has the financial means to pay for top-notch intellectual labor in the global academic labor market. Ethiopia, which ranked 138 out of 148 nations in the macroeconomic context, luring qualified faculty members to a global university labor market can be questionable.

The ongoing faculty expatriation practice in public HEIs in Ethiopia seems only to provide job opportunities to fill the academic vacant positions, ignoring the country’s regulatory laws that declare work permits for foreign citizens in its civil service proclamations [32,33,39]. Accordingly, the policy dimension of the utility of expatriate faculty has not yet attained its goal. As the interviewees reflected, the faculty employment rights of the citizens seem to substitute for expatriate faculty, while highly skilled academics were pushed out for several reasons, of which the most frequently spoken were sheer politics, better working environments, and high incomes. Thus, the interviewees unequivocally suggested that Ethiopian public HEIs appeared to prefer to recruit the original skilled resources as compared to the ongoing practices of faculty expatriation processes in low-cost academic labor market terrain.

In sum, although the utility of expatriate faculty is advantageous for technology transfer, the frequently observed policy-related disadvantages adversely affect to reverse the brain drain to brain gain. The commonly mentioned negative effects of expatriate faculty employment ignoring the employment rights of the highly skilled original citizens, disrespect for the country’s highly skilled resources, deskilling of the domestic academic labor market, increased outflows of foreign currency as remittances, destruction of homegrown culture and knowledge, pushing out the skilled resources for better income and academic environments, and the spread of corrupt practices in the academic state of affairs. Moreover, in the same academic competency, the wider salary gaps between expatriate and compatriot faculty members violate the country’s laws and human rights acts since 1964, to which Ethiopia is a signatory.

4. Conclusion

In a nutshell, this policy critique informs us that, for sustainable faculty development in public universities, it is preferable to keep the highly qualified academic resources in the nation and turn the brain drain into brain gain rather than hiring expatriate professors from the low-cost academic labor market. For specialized information sharing and technology transfer, however, it is essential to engage highly skilled faculty members whose academic competencies cannot be duplicated by internal faculty members. Moreover, it makes sense to promote the faculty development of the nation’s public HEIs by developing plans to keep qualified academic resources domestically and by creating conditions that would draw in a highly qualified diaspora and suitable expatriate academics. Hiring less competent faculty members from low-cost academic labor markets with salaries six times higher than native academics with the same academic rank and competency deters internal academic resources, with the result that they leave in search of higher money.

However, hiring qualified foreign teachers who offer the same benefits as native educators could aid in gaining insight from the variety of approaches to faculty development. The practice of paying foreign professors over eight times more than national academics with comparable degrees and academic rank is discriminatory since it violates citizens’ rights to academic employment. This experience puts faculty development sustainability in jeopardy, with implications for higher education quality. Consequently, rather than attempting to implement a faculty hiring policy that turns brain drain into brain gain by any means, legislators, strategic planners, and chief executive officers of higher education should reconsider. Faculty members’ development in Ethiopia can benefit from reconsidering how and on what to do to attract and keep highly competent professors from the academic labor market, reduce the brain drain, and maintain highly talented internal resources. Thus, unlocking faculty development options are necessary for internationalizing higher education for knowledge sharing. This is an essential strategy to stop the brain drain and attract highly qualified foreign professors from the academic labor market worldwide.

5. Future Action

The Ethiopian government should develop a strategic plan to convert brain drain into brain gain in public HEIs. This includes raising the expatriation ceiling and attracting qualified foreign faculty. The appointment of foreign professors should be subject to laws protecting original citizens’ rights. The faculty employment policy should aim to achieve academic freedom, quality, relevance, and equality, thereby supporting faulty development in Ethiopian public universities.

Declaration of Interest Statement

This manuscript is my original work and has no potential conflicts of interest.

Ethical statements

Ethical approval is not applicable to this manuscript.