Top Turkish students opt for medicine, tech engineering

Students who achieve the highest scores in the university entrance exam in Türkiye prefer to study medicine, psychology, and engineering the most, while once-popular fields like law are now less favored among the top students, local media has reported.

As the results of the university entrance exam, which around 3 million people compete in, the universities that students were eligible to enter were announced on July 19, educators began analyzing which fields attracted the most interest.
Accordingly, with the rise of various software-based applications, especially artificial intelligence, many bright students, including those who scored full marks, opted for computer or software engineering. Medicine, which has traditionally been at the top of the list for Türkiye's most promising students' university preferences, maintained its popularity this year as well, albeit with a slight decrease compared to previous years.
Over the last two years, students achieving the highest scores in the exam have been following a different trend than before by choosing computer engineering over medicine. Psychology remains a highly preferred field among Turkish students in recent years.
Promising the most important professions in the judiciary such as advocacy, prosecution, and judgeship, continues to experience a decline in student preferences in recent years, particularly with law programs at private universities not being on the list of many students.

According to Türkiye's Higher Education Board (YÖK), the university entrance exams held in 2023 had the highest participation rate among the candidates.

Universities around the nation have nearly 1 million open quotas for associate and bachelor's degrees.