Making Invisible Attrition Visible: A Feedback-Based Mechanism For Managing Academic Staff Turnover in Uzbekistan’s Higher Education Institutions

Official turnover statistics in higher education count only recorded separations, so they miss the exits of staff on concurrent and hourly appointments and the expiry of fixed-term contracts. In Uzbekistan, where student enrolment grew 5.8-fold in a decade while academic staff grew 2.2-fold, 18.2% of academic posts are held on external concurrent or hourly terms and remain outside both turnover reporting and the national ranking. This article develops a feedback-based mechanism for managing academic staff turnover. It combines a comparative analysis of national regulations, administrative data on 237 higher education institutions for the 2025/2026 academic year and a survey of 1,005 faculty members. Four regulatory gaps were identified: no reporting of staff movements, no limit on non-main employment, no ceiling on teaching load and no staff stability indicator among ranking-based incentives. The proposed mechanism links the state, institutional and department levels through a staff movement register, a two-layer system of ten indicators that separates actual exits from turnover intentions, an institutional risk classification and two feedback loops. Applied to 175 institutions, the classification placed 74 of them, enrolling 43.3% of students, at high risk; computing the student–teacher ratio on all posts instead of main posts would understate the risk of 37.8% of these institutions. Survey-based simulations suggest that formalising employment mainly improves institutional visibility rather than individual intentions, whereas combined workload, pay and culture measures could reduce the share of staff with high turnover intention from 14.2% to 6.6%.