Azerbaijani Higher Education to implement mass English Medium Instruction (EMI) Policies: From brain drain to brain bridging

In the last decade, Azerbaijani universities’ upward implementation of English-medium instruction (EMI) policy has spread among most of the country's universities, public and private. Students are no longer enthusiastic about getting an education in their native language, neither they see Russian as a medium of instruction that used to be a vehicle for a brighter future. Research suggests that the rapid implementation of EMI policy is primarily motivated by the pursuit of internationalization (Williams, 2023), participation in international projects (Mammadova, 2020), and international academic mobility (Mammadova, 2023). As a result, attributed to the mass abandoning of the country by young early career specialists who have recently graduated from Higher Educational Institutions (HEI), the country annually loses a high number of qualified personnel (see Figure 1) who heavily resort to their linguistic competencies and go after a ‘better life’. Figure 1 demonstrates the average value for Azerbaijan to leave the country during the period between 2015 and 2022. With an average of 4.74 points out of 10, the minimum 4 index point was observed in 2016 and a maximum of 4.4 index points in 2022. In turn, the UN Migrant Stocks (2021) reports that by mid-2020 Azerbaijan had an emigration rate of 10.6 percent of its entire population. According to Chaikhana Media (2022), ‘there's a brain drain in Azerbaijan, highly-skilled people do leave their country even though they have had a high salary in Azerbaijan.’