The YKS results and the different dimensions of universitization in Turkey

Three days ago YÖK announced the placement results made according to the preferences that university candidates submitted between 27 July and 8 August 2023, based on this year's ÖSYM exam results. First of all, may these results be auspicious for all the students who completed high school this year and are beginning university life, and for their parents. The university has become almost the main goal of all the education so far. It is an important stage because it forms the basis of the professional equipment a person acquires when launching into life.

YÖK's announcement of the results was generally made comparatively with the results of the previous year, 2022. In this way we have the chance to see the differences in the rate of university expansion over two years. For example, last year 3 million 243 thousand 334 candidates applied, while this year, with an increase of nearly 9%, 3 million 527 thousand 443 candidates applied.

In higher education programs offering formal education (excluding open education), the total quota was 867,224 in 2022 and became 923,411 in 2023. The total number of placed candidates, excluding open education, was 850,631 in 2022, and this number came to 898,024 in 2023. According to these data, the total number of placed candidates increased by 47,393 over last year. We are pleased to see the growing demand for our higher education institutions.

In 2021 the vacant quotas were 169 thousand, in 2022 they were 17 thousand, and in 2023 they came to a total of 25 thousand (including quotas of 8,828 set aside for earthquake survivors, women over 34, and relatives of martyrs/veterans).

Without doubt these differences also offer important data for broader comparisons covering the last twenty years, and even the periods in which serious university expansion drives took place in Turkey. We see that there has been continuity in the process that has been under way for years regarding the rate and speed of university expansion. The simplest and, at first glance, most striking datum showing this is that the increase in the figures is far ahead of population growth. While the population growth rate is at around 2 percent, applications to and admissions to university have increased at around 9 percent.

It is well known that, over the last twenty years, a veritable high speed, so to speak, has been shown in Turkey in the rate of university expansion. The number of universities rose from 76 to 208, but university expansion, that is, the number of university students per total population, increased far more than this rate. Because along with the increase in the number of existing universities, their quotas were also increased by as much.

In the past the number of students per Faculty of Medicine instructor was at nearly the lowest levels in the world (as far as I remember, 3.5 percent). In the most developed countries such as the US and Germany this is at levels of 18 and 21 percent. This datum alone should at first glance have given the impression that medical education in our country was at a very high level. Yet the situation was exactly the opposite. The low number of students meant not a high level of education, but only that medical education in the past did not assume the necessary responsibility for training more students.

Yet the country had a very urgent need for more doctors and health workers. This had even become a subject of serious dispute between the YÖK administration of the time and Prime Minister Erdoğan. To the YÖK administration, which took refuge in the excuse that there were not enough instructors, Erdoğan replied: "What is your job? Am I going to train the instructors?" Even so, he did not leave the matter to them; he made arrangements to increase the quotas and, in a short time, raised the student-training capacities of the same Faculties of Medicine severalfold, even before opening a new Faculty of Medicine.

Development at this speed, within such a short time, justified the impression that medical education in the past had in fact been deliberately suppressed by certain people. But who was doing this suppressing? We cannot say foreign circles that wanted Turkey to be externally dependent in the field of medicine, because while the country was so poor, Turkey was far from being able to produce health customers for abroad either. The only victim of the health sector, which did not develop because of this suppression, was the public, but the second victims were the students who wanted to receive medical education. After a grueling marathon of exams very few people could qualify for this education, and while the education process took place under a discipline that was as arduous, costly and humiliating as possible, the hierarchies that formed within the profession built and nourished a network of hierarchical sultanate within the discipline. Probably the greatest resistance to the increase in capacities also came from this urge to protect professional power. We also saw that this resistance built itself another, ideological wall of defense in the period of 28 February.

The same thing happened in other fields as well. On the whole, university education in a country does not only mean receiving a good education and having a profession; it also serves the formation of a typology of citizen who is stronger, more capable of representation, informed of their rights and demanding. For that reason sociologists have stressed that the most important process feeding American democracy is university expansion; indeed, in the US, with its population of 300 million, higher education contributes to the formation of this democratic atmosphere with 5000 universities.

Through capacity increases and the opening of new universities, the number of university students in Turkey, with an increase that can be considered excessively fast within a short time, has nearly taken first place in the world rankings. According to YÖK's data, the number of university students has now reached 8.5 million. This figure points to a share that exceeds almost 10 percent of Turkey's population.

The provision of university education services, whichever way you look at it, is an indicator of development for a country. These numerical developments also mean a constant increase in the budgets allocated to it. This is both a choice and, of course, a requirement of the economic and social development course into which Turkey has been brought through this choice.

A university expansion at this speed and at this rate undoubtedly has very important consequences for Turkish democracy and political participation. Truth be told, accounts vary as to whether so much university expansion is positive or negative, in both its economic and social dimensions and its political dimensions. These accounts need to be examined.