Yesterday at six o’clock in the evening, the reception of electronic applications for admission to educational institutions of Ukraine ended. An exciting moment for both applicants and their parents, because the number of budget places is traditionally limited. So the opportunity to see the promised “recommended” is far from everyone, especially according to the first or second priority, which usually reflect the real aspirations of the entrants, and not an attempt to “slip” anything on the budget.
The finalization of admission is also interesting for those who follow trends in education, because the dot in the submission of applications opens the page of this year’s statistics, which is so painful to compare with the data of past years to answer the question: do young people stay in Ukraine? Is domestic education attractive to her? How do specialties become the most in demand? With which regions do this year’s school graduates associate their student life? The questions, you agree, are very important in the conditions of the war, the general demographic crisis caused primarily by forced migration, and the crisis state of the labor market.
We used the data of two basic resources for the admission campaign, vstup.osvita.ua and vstup.edbo.gov.ua, to visualize trends in the field of education. What happened?
The histogram reflects the dynamics of applicant activity and, at the same time, changes in our country. The last year before the war shows a surge in the interest of graduates in studying at universities. In 2022, this activity drops quite expectedly, because in the spring of the first year of the war, many Ukrainians went abroad in search of salvation from Russian aggression. The year 2023, also a war year, became a year of hope for victory, because the information field was full of reports about a counteroffensive and a quick end to the war. The market of educational services reacted sensitively to positive expectations and revived a little. Here we see an increase in the number of people willing to enter educational institutions of Ukraine. Instead, 2024 returned Ukrainians to the realities of a devastating war, so the number of applicants to universities decreased significantly.
This year, 329,500 entrants submitted 992,000 electronic applications for admission. According to data, published by the Ukrainian Center for the Assessment of the Quality of Education (UCEA), 231,000 of them are this year’s school graduates.
The rest are graduates of previous years who decided to improve their results from the multi-subject text or external examination in order to have a better chance of admission this year.
For the last three years, the number of school graduates has remained practically unchanged at the level of 220-250 thousand people, but in 2008 their number reached 640 thousand.
Last year, applicant activity was almost 390,000 more applications. Accordingly, there were 200,000 more entrants. This trend is likely to reactivate conversations about the reduction of higher education institutions. Let’s look at these numbers regionally.
Kyiv (213,941 applications) and Lviv (99,095 applications) have traditionally become the leaders in admissions. Kharkiv, a famous student city, took the third place with 47,355 applications, despite the constant shelling, the destruction of the infrastructure of universities and the proximity to the front.
We were pleasantly surprised by Dnipro (39,017 applications) and Odesa (38,829 applications), which are also far from the safest cities in our country. But at the same time, the zeros of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson regions caused pain. In general, it can be seen that student life is moving away from the frontline regions inland, because there education takes place in classrooms. And young people, who are tired of online, in particular, the covid period, long for live communication and offline acquisition of knowledge.
