Studentów Instytutu Lotnictwa w Charkowie może uczęszczać na zajęcia z dronami FPV w podziemnej sali wykładowej w Charkowie, Ukraina, 27 października 2025 r.
W podziemnym poligonie w Instytucie Lotnictwa w Charkowie pierwszoroczna studentka Anastasia Homel wpatruje się uważnie, gdy jej profesor rozbiera i ponownie składa karabin automatyczny przed swoją klasą.
To obrazek tego, jak wojna zmieniła edukację i życie studenckie dla studentów uczących się w schronach przeciwlotniczych po tym, jak ich kampus był celem rosyjskich ataków rakietowych, dronów i artylerii ponad 100 razy od 2022 roku, zmuszając zajęcia dosłownie pod ziemią.
Na uniwersytecie, znanym również jako KAI, zaledwie 25 mil od granicy rosyjskiej, niedaleko miejsca, gdzie początkowa inwazja Rosji obejmowała pierścień drogowy, który biegnie wzdłuż północnych krańców Charkowa, drugiego co do wielkości miasta Ukrainy.
Homel early choices at the KAI show how the war is reshaping what Ukrainian college students study. Just two months into her time at the institute, she chose to go into 3D modeling.
„Working with 3D programs is really like. Descriptive geometry is pretty interesting; it’s totally different from normal mathematics,” Homel said. That specialization, in turn, put her into the department of rocketry and aerospace, where some of her earliest assignments focused on drone and missile design.
Homel is by no means alone within KAI, nor is KAI alone within Ukraine. Higher education within Ukraine is undergoing a fundamental transformation.
The needs of the war effort and, particularly, Ukraine’s new defense industry are changing the job market for new graduates in Ukraine. Students of a techie bent are increasingly turning away from software development and toward hard engineering to deliver future weapons.
Open data from Ukraine’s Education and Science Ministry show that KAI in 2021 had 110 students, both full and part-time, specializing in software engineering. By 2024, that number had dropped to 52.
„What’s important is people who can both come up with new ideas and build them with their own hands.”
As an aviation school, aerospace was always bigger at KAI. But the number of students enrolled in aviation and rocketry technology grew from 194 to 365 over the same timespan.
This is not unique to KAI, nor even to the relatively frontline education throughout Kharkiv. Even Kyiv Polytechnic University, one of the biggest contributors to Ukraine’s massive IT industry, has seen its software engineering enrollment slip from 558 to 499.
Total enrollment in software engineering specialization across Ukrainian universities slipped from 5,968 to 5,279 from 2021 to 2024 – despite the fact that those programs are some of the easiest to do remotely, even from the safety of the EU.
Hard engineering specialization meanwhile spiked. Industrial machine engineering majors nationwide grew from 7,213 to 9,979. Electric Power Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electromechanics from 11,591 to 14,011; Automation, which in the interval also grew to include robotics, increased from 5,183 to 6,130.
„Right now, what’s important is people who can both come up with new ideas and build them with their own hands,” Andriy Bykov, a senior lecturer in IT and flight design at KAI, told the Kyiv Independent, showing off an underground laboratory full of flight simulators and computer numerical control (CNC) machines set out on beige tables in white-walled rooms – an aesthetic not unlike an Apple Store.
The change in education is moreover a leading indicator of a massive shift in a planned post-war economy – preparation for weapons tech’s metamorphosis from a survival mechanism to Ukraine’s next boom industry.
„They have changed fundamentally, and we are continuing to change them, because the war dictates its own terms and its own priorities,” KAI Acting Rector Oleksiy Lytvynov told the Kyiv Independent, noting that they’d created new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-related programs to encourage the trend.
At the universities of Ukraine in general, and Kharkiv in particular, war is in session.
