Istanbul Schools Face Crunch Week as University Exam Results, Budget Cuts and Earthquake-Proofing Deadlines Collide

Three separate education stories broke simultaneously in Istanbul this week, all of them demanding immediate answers. University entrance exam scores from the YKS were released on Tuesday, triggering the annual scramble for placement at Turkey's most competitive institutions. At the same time, the Ministry of National Education confirmed it is withholding roughly 340 million lira in scheduled infrastructure transfers to Istanbul municipality schools — a dispute rooted in the ongoing tension between the AKP government and CHP-run Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. And a July 1 deadline passed quietly for the city's compulsory seismic assessment programme, leaving at least 60 school buildings in Avcılar and Bağcılar without certified retrofit plans.

The timing is not coincidental. Turkey holds its next parliamentary budget cycle review in September, and education funding for Istanbul has become a visible front in the broader political standoff between Ankara and City Hall. With Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu still fighting legal battles stemming from his March 2025 detention, the municipality's education arm — the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Directorate of Education — has been operating under sustained financial pressure for more than a year. School administrators in Fatih and Esenyurt have told local reporters they have postponed building maintenance and equipment purchases into 2027.

YKS Results Expose Istanbul's Widening School Divide

Tuesday's release of YKS composite scores laid bare what educators in the city have been warning about for two years. Students from İstanbul Erkek Lisesi in Cağaloğlu and Kabataş Erkek Lisesi in Beşiktaş again dominated the top percentiles. But pass rates at public schools in Sultanbeyli and Esenyurt — two districts with high proportions of Syrian-born students — dropped by an estimated 8 percentage points compared with last year's cohort, according to a preliminary analysis published by the Education Reform Initiative, a research group based in Cihangir. The group cautioned the figure is provisional and will be refined when the full district-level data is published later this month.

The gap matters because it maps almost perfectly onto where the city's Syrian refugee integration programmes are concentrated. An estimated 187,000 school-age Syrian children are registered in Istanbul, the majority in outer districts. The Ministry of National Education's Temporary Education Centre network, which at its 2019 peak ran 109 separate centres across the city, has been nearly fully absorbed into the mainstream school system — a policy change that was supposed to accelerate integration but has instead overwhelmed classrooms running at 120 percent capacity in parts of Gaziosmanpaşa.

Boğaziçi Admissions and the Earthquake-Readiness Gap

Boğaziçi University, whose main South Campus sits above the Bosphorus in Bebek, announced Thursday that it received 94,000 first-preference applications for approximately 1,800 undergraduate places — a record since the university switched to the central placement system. Demand for the university's engineering and computer science faculties has surged, driven partly by the tech hiring boom in Istanbul's Maslak and Levent business corridors. Tuition at state universities remains nominally low — around 1,500 lira per semester for domestic undergraduates — but dormitory costs at private student housing near the Bebek and Rumelihisarı campuses now routinely exceed 12,000 lira a month, a figure that has tripled since 2023.

The seismic issue is less glamorous but more urgent. The 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes prompted a national audit of school buildings, and Istanbul was ordered to certify every public school structure under a programme administered jointly by AFAD and the Istanbul Governorship by July 1, 2026. Neighbourhood sources and municipal documents reviewed by this newspaper indicate that 62 school buildings across Avcılar — a district sitting on soft alluvial soil considered high-risk — remain without approved retrofit contracts. The governorship has not publicly addressed the missed deadline.

Parents with children starting the new academic year in September should check whether their school's seismic status appears on the Ministry's e-Okul portal, where retrofit certification is now listed as a required data field. Families applying to universities through the ÖSYM placement system have until July 24 to submit their preferences. And school administrators waiting on the withheld municipal transfers should expect no resolution before the September budget hearings — meaning the autumn term begins under the same constraints that defined the spring.