Fixing Ukraine’s brain drain means honesty about graduate outcomes

Confronted by the biggest movement of refugees in Europe since 1945, Western universities have responded admirably to the plight of students displaced by Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Thousands of scholarships, bursaries and study opportunities have been offered by institutions from Warsaw to Washington and Manchester to Madrid, with university campuses likely to welcome many more Ukrainian students from this term.

Whether many of these students will ever return to Ukraine is, for some, another of the tragedies to befall the country. But while the scale of the student exodus is unprecedented, the issue is not a new one for Ukraine: in 2021, more than 82,000 of students from Ukraine were studying at foreign universities, with one in every 15 Ukrainian high school graduates going abroad to study.

The vast majority chose the countries of Eastern Europe, with Poland the leader, hosting almost half of Ukrainian students abroad. But why did so many leave to study in Poland or elsewhere? Are its universities, or those in the Czech Republic or Slovakia for that matter, powerful, research universities offering far superior education? Of course not.

Instead, the answer is the Polish labour market, which creates additional value for the country’s higher education institutions. How? The main reason is the  high rate of employment of its graduates (78 per cent) – which is not far off the average employability rate across Europe, which hit almost 85 per cent in 2021.

The highest rate is in the Netherlands, which, like Malta, Germany, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovenia, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Ireland and Latvia, saw 90 per cent of university graduates employed not long after leaving university. At the rear are three EU states – Greece, Italy and Spain – where employability was below 80 per cent. So what is the graduate employability rate in Ukraine?

A few weeks before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Ukraine gave its answer: 59 per cent.

It followed an ambitious national project by the education ministry to monitor graduate employability, which, for 30 years after Ukraine gained independence, was neither calculated by universities nor its higher education regulator. Discussions about graduate employability resembled, until February, pure philosophy rather than concrete strategy given the mystery around what the employment average actually was.

The decision to monitor graduate employability nationally came amid a growing sense of a skills mismatch between higher education and the labour market.

Of course, the issue of choosing a university is complex, particularly when an economy has been damaged by war. Students will look for quality and decent post-study work prospects and make their own decisions – but universities also need to respond to the needs of local employers and industries.

Despite fears about economic collapse, the Ukrainian labour market is slowly starting to recover – with about 7 per cent more new job vacancies in July than April. So will graduate employability also pick up in the coming months, or when the war ends? The picture remains unclear.

Internationally, however, the trend towards students becoming more career-minded is clear. According to the study “Top Study Abroad Market Trends of 2021” conducted by educations.com (10,000 prospective students across 181 countries) in October 2021, there has been a significant transformation of student motivation in the global higher education market. If three years ago, the main motives of students for studying abroad were self-development and gaining new cultural experiences, then in 2021 the main motive became achieving career goals.

Some Ukrainian universities can report graduate employability rates higher than 59 per cent, and maybe for some programmes even higher than the 78 per cent seen in Poland. It is now time for Ukrainian universities to communicate with their applicants using the analytics they value. Ignoring this wisdom is a big mistake.

Ukraine’s universities need to publish this information for high school graduates, however uncomfortable the figures may be. Keeping talented young people in Ukraine will be essential for restoring the country after the war. According to Global Talent Competitiveness Index 2021, neighbouring Poland is 21st, while Ukraine is ranked 40th.

Ukraine’s brain drain is not inevitable but fixing its long-standing graduate employability problem will be a crucial part of the country’s post-war success.

Alexander Kostyuk is co-editor-in-chief of the journal, Corporate Ownership and Control, and is based in Sumy, in northeast Ukraine. He was previously a professor at the Ukrainian Academy of Banking of the National Bank of Ukraine and has held visiting professorships at Hanken School of Economics, ISTEC in Paris and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.