War's educational toll: NYU Tandon research reveals 78,000 Ukrainian students directly impacted by Russian war

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has displaced approximately 36,500 graduating high school students — 16% of the country's 2022 senior class — while causing an additional 41,500 students to abandon the traditional pathway to higher education entirely, according to a new study published in Nature's Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

The research, conducted by a multi-disciplinary team based in the United States and Ukraine and led by Julia Stoyanovich — Director of NYU's Center for Responsible AI, Institute Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and Associate Professor of Data Science at the NYU Center for Data Science — shows that at least 78,000 students (34% of all graduating high school seniors) were directly impacted by the war in 2022.

The team completed the study as part of the RAI for Ukraine Research Program, which Stoyanovich founded at NYU Tandon with partners from Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, in response to the war's disruption of Ukrainian higher education. The remote program is open to undergraduate and graduate students who live in Ukraine and are enrolled in degree programs in computer science, information systems, and related fields at accredited Ukrainian universities.

These students — RAI Research Fellows — are mentored by academic researchers from U.S. and European universities, and conduct cutting-edge collaborative research on a range of responsible AI topics. Students receive academic credit and competitive stipends.

The Nature study represents the first systematic analysis of student displacement and educational disruption following Russia's 2022 invasion, providing data for policymakers and humanitarian organizations.

"To the best of our knowledge, no information is available about the impact of the war on the internal and external displacement of high school students," said Stoyanovich. "Our analysis has important implications for governmental organizations and human rights organizations working to address the crisis."

Of the 36,500 displaced students identified, 64% migrated abroad, with most heading to Poland (30.7%), Germany (26.9%), and the Czech Republic (8.3%). The remaining 36% were internally displaced within Ukraine, typically moving from front-line regions toward the central and western parts of the country.

The regions most affected were those along the war's front lines: Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Mykolaiv oblasts, where between 41% and 100% of students were registered in their home regions but took exams elsewhere.

The analysis also uncovered disparities in how different demographic groups experienced the war's educational impacts. Among displaced students, 84% came from urban areas despite rural students making up 31% of all test-takers.

The most severely affected group was rural male students, who experienced the greatest decrease in exam participation. "The impact of the war on drop-off for rural-males was greater than for either test-takers living in rural areas or males, indicating an intersectional disadvantage," said Stoyanovich.

Beyond displacement, the study documented a 21% decline in students taking Ukraine's standardized higher education entrance exam in 2022 compared to 2021—representing 41,500 fewer students.

Ukraine's response included rapidly digitizing its paper-based exam system into a computer-based National Multi-subject Test. This transition required developing new software and delivering it to hundreds of thousands of students, making the exam available in 32 countries worldwide for the first time.

The study's methodology relied on comparing students' official registration locations with where they physically completed their standardized exams, a novel approach that revealed displacement patterns invisible to traditional surveys. The researchers overcame significant technical challenges to create their analysis, curating "a uniquely comprehensive dataset of standardized exam outcomes used for admissions to higher education institutions in Ukraine—analogous to the Standardized Aptitude Test (SAT) in the United States," according to the researchers. The dataset encompasses approximately 1.5 million graduating students across eight years.

Ukraine's period of decommunization and decentralization between 2016 and 2023 created substantial data consistency challenges. To solve this problem, researchers assigned unique identifiers to each physical location and educational institution, allowing them to track entities consistently despite name changes and territorial redistricting.

The researchers warn that "reversing 'brain drain'—to the extent it is even possible—is no easy feat for any country" and note that "the issue may be time-sensitive: as the war continues, some families become more deeply rooted in their lives abroad."

In addition to Stoyanovich, the paper's authors are Tetiana Zakharchenko and Nazarii Drushchak from Ukrainian Catholic University, Oleksandra Konopatska from both Ukrainian Catholic University and Kyiv School of Economics, Andrew Bell, Ph.D. candidate at NYU Tandon and Falaah Arif Khan, Ph.D. student at the NYU Center for Data Science.

 The research was supported in part by a grant from the Simons Foundation.