Some university departments in Greece used to admit more than 100 freshmen a year. This fall, a few welcomed fewer students than could fill a family dinner table.
Across the country, 13 departments enrolled fewer than 10 new students and 25 took in fewer than 20. Greece offered 68,788 university places this year, but only 58,182 applicants secured admission. Nearly 10,000 seats—roughly one in seven—were left vacant. The numbers highlight a widening problem for Greece’s largely state-run university system. Regional institutions are competing for a shrinking pool of students who are increasingly reluctant to move far from home for degrees with uncertain employment prospects.
Greece’s admissions rules are partly responsible. Applicants must exceed a minimum score derived from the national university entrance examinations. The threshold was designed to keep poorly prepared students out of higher education. It has also prevented thousands of available places from being filled, with the impact falling disproportionately on less-popular departments outside Athens and Thessaloniki.
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Location can be as important as grades. An Athens student offered a place on Samos, an island in the eastern Aegean close to Turkey, must consider rent and living expenses as well as the cost of traveling home. Samos’s mathematics department admitted around 150 students in 2020, but one student from that intake recalls only about 30 regularly attending classes.
Departments are now trying to make themselves harder to pass over. The mathematics faculty on Samos is developing an artificial-intelligence curriculum, betting that the boom in AI can revive interest in a discipline central to algorithms and machine learning. Physics departments are similarly promoting careers outside the traditional route of school teaching, including software, data-driven industries and medical physics.
The government has shifted some university places away from Athens and Thessaloniki toward regional institutions. But redistributing seats doesn’t guarantee that students will occupy them. Nor does admission guarantee enrollment. At the University of Patras, around 400 successful applicants didn’t register this year, according to its rector, who pointed to financial pressures and high living costs.
That leaves Greece confronting a question bigger than admissions policy. Departments with only a handful of students are expensive to sustain and increasingly difficult to justify. For some universities, the problem is no longer how many students they can admit. It is whether enough will come to keep the doors open.
