ÖSYM, Turkey's national exam authority, announced the results of the additional placement round for the 2026 YKS, the university entrance exam, on 28 September 2026, and registrations took place on 2–9 October. With that, the 2026 placement season is completely closed. The picture it leaves behind is instructive for anyone curious about how university admissions work: more than half of the hundred-thousand-plus places opened in the additional round stayed empty. Below I look at the numbers, the reasons places go unfilled and what a candidate choosing programmes in 2027 should take from this picture.
How many places stayed empty in the additional placement round?
According to the figures ÖSYM released alongside the additional placement results, 100,738 places in on-campus programmes, excluding open education, were opened for additional placement. Candidates were placed in 44,974 of them and 55,764 stayed empty. The unfilled places are spread across state and foundation (private) universities; fee-paying places at foundation universities make up the largest share, but thousands of places at state universities did not fill either.
What is additional placement and who can use it?
It is a second round of choices opened in September for candidates who were not placed in a programme in the main placement in August, or who were placed but did not register. A candidate who was placed in the main round and registered cannot take part in additional placement; this rule makes the additional round a second chance for those left without a place rather than an opportunity to have a go at something better. The vacant places are announced programme by programme in ÖSYM's guide, and candidates make their choices according to their own score types.
Why do places stay empty?
Three reasons stand out. The first is cost: the fee-paying places at foundation universities, in programmes with no scholarship or only a small one, exceed what candidates can afford. Most of the places nobody chose are in this group. The second is geography: programmes at some state universities outside the big cities do not make it onto the preference list when a similar score would allow studying in a metropolitan area. The third is how a department is perceived: programmes seen as offering poor job prospects are left empty even by candidates whose scores are sufficient.
There is also a structural reason. For years the number of places opened has run above the number of candidates who sit the exam and want to be placed. It is good news that there is a place for everyone who wants to go to university; whether that place is the one they want is another matter. The table of empty places shows the gap between those two things.
Does an empty place mean a programme is easy to get into?
Partly. If a programme had places left over, its cut-off score in the additional round will have dropped, and in some programmes no cut-off score may have formed at all, apart from the ranking requirement. But that does not mean the same programme will have empty places in 2027 too. A programme that stays empty one year sometimes opens the next year with fewer places, sometimes with a bigger scholarship, and fills up. What a 2027 candidate needs to look at is not a single year but the trend over the last three.
What should 2027 candidates learn from this picture?
The first lesson is how much the "safety" choices on a preference list matter. Some of the candidates left without a place after the main round were not candidates whose scores fell short, but candidates who filled their list only with highly ranked programmes. When the last few places on the list are not given to programmes you would genuinely attend and your score comfortably reaches, additional placement becomes the only option, and the programme you wanted is usually no longer there by then. The article on how to build a preference list explains how to strike that balance.
The second lesson concerns scholarship rates at foundation universities. The fee-paying places left empty in the additional round show that the scholarship places in the same programmes filled up in the main round. The cut-off scores for full-scholarship and 50 percent scholarship places are far higher than for fee-paying ones. Treating the different scholarship tiers of the same programme as separate programmes when making your choices keeps both expectations and the budget realistic.
The third lesson is to track your success ranking rather than the score itself. Cut-off scores shift from year to year with the difficulty of the exam, but the ranking of the last candidate placed in a programme is more stable. A 2027 candidate should note down the rankings of their target programmes over the last three years now and compare their mock exam results against those rankings. The topic tests for TYT and AYT, the basic proficiency and field proficiency stages of the YKS, are suited to tracking net scores, which is the first step in that comparison.
Why is open education not in this picture?
The figures above cover on-campus programmes only; ÖSYM assesses open education places separately. Since most open education programmes either have no cap on places or keep it very wide, the concept of an "empty place" carries no meaning there. Some of the candidates who could not get into an on-campus programme are placed in open education in the same period; that is why the on-campus table shows not the total number of students entering higher education but the shortfall in demand for on-campus places. And that shortfall is what matters for a 2027 candidate: finding a place in an on-campus programme is easier than people think, while finding a place in the programme you want gets a little more competitive every year.
What does a candidate lose by not registering?
A candidate who is placed in a programme in the additional round and does not register is free to sit the exam again the following year, but because they count as having been placed, the contribution of their secondary school achievement score to the next year's placement is reduced; this rule is written in the guide and surprises some candidates every year. So choosing programmes on the basis of "I'll get placed and then see" can mean starting a few thousand places further back in the rankings the following year. Those who made choices in 2026 and did not register need to build their 2027 plan with this in mind.