Ukraine to Inspect ‘Abnormal’ 2,000 Percent Spike in Draft-Age Men Applying for College

The Ukrainian government will be conducting random inspections at colleges and universities across the country, a decision prompted by a nearly 2,000 percent increase in the number of applications from draft-age men since the full-blown war with Russia began more than two years ago.

Ukraine’s State Service of Education Quality, an agency within the country’s education ministry tasked with overseeing education standards, said it had examined state data on men born between 1964 and 1994 who either entered or returned to full-time education between 2021 and 2023.

The results of the analysis, according to the agency, indicate an “abnormal increase” in applications to higher education and professional pre-higher education programs—a 1,880 percent surge in 2022, when the almost decade-long Russo-Ukrainian conflict escalated into a full-scale invasion.

“The biggest spike was recorded in privately owned educational institutions, in separate structural units of both forms of higher education institutions, as well as in some state-owned institutions,” the agency said on April 5, noting that those state-owned schools in 2021 enrolled not a single man of that age category.

Under Ukraine’s current conscription policies, enrolling as a first-year college student exempts a man from being drafted into military service for three to four years, depending on the course of study. However, those policies could change when Ukraine finds itself in need of more men on the frontline.

Most of those conscription-age applicants, the Ukrainian government said, were seeking to enroll in programs with the lowest cost and minimal entrance requirements, such as the ones that required no more than just a motivational letter. In fact, in the immediate years following the Russian invasion, “only a small fraction” of conscription-age individuals went to college by submitting their standardized test scores.

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When it comes to the fields of study, the agency reported that institutions in the medical field showed the lowest increase in enrollment numbers, along with other disciplines that involve stringent academic requirements or extensive prior training.

Overall, this dramatic rise in enrollments has placed a huge burden on the colleges’ budgets and manpower, to the point that they are at risk of being unable to meet their obligations outlined by Ukraine’s education law, the agency warned.

“In such a situation, the Service sees significant risks that may cause long-term negative consequences,” it said, pledging to conduct random inspections of colleges until the end of this academic year.

The announcement comes as Kyiv enacted a series of measures to expand conscription as the war with Russia drags into its third year.

On April 11, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, or Parliament, passed a much-debated bill that, among other things, bans men who don’t respond to their draft summons on time from driving and allows convicts who were previously banned from the military to serve in return for a suspended sentence. The bill also makes it a legal obligation for local governments and police to help the military in mobilization efforts.

Its final version does not, however, include a demobilization clause that would allow soldiers to return home after 36 months of service, which had been the standard policy before the war.

The bill will come into force once approved by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who earlier this month signed into law a bill that lowered the draft age from 27 to 25.

Russia, which has its own problems with manpower and logistics, is reportedly seeing a recent surge in enlistments.

About 16,000 people have signed up in the past 10 days, Russia’s defense ministry said on April 3, attributing the result to public outrage over last month’s terror attack on a Moscow concert hall, which claimed the lives of more than 140 people and left hundreds more wounded. ISIS-K, an Afghanistan-based Islamic terrorist group, claimed credit for the massacre.