Today and tomorrow is the first enrolment round at the „Ss. Cyril and Methodius” University. Across its 23 faculties there are 8,851 places available for the 2026/2027 academic year. Of those, 4,395 are for full-time students in the state quota, 3,621 for full-time students with co-financing and 835 for part-time students.

Those figures are duly published. What also repeats every single year, but never makes it into any prospectus, are the queues outside the faculties in temperatures near 40 degrees.

The dual system that never quite ends

Candidates have to register on the UKIM enrolment portal and complete an electronic application through the system. That is the digital part. Then comes the second part: in person, at a counter, original documents in hand, with the e-application number typed in again manually.

So the e-application exists, but it replaces nothing. It is an add-on, not a solution. The student fills it in online, then goes to submit it physically.

Once accepted, they bring an index book, a student ID, application forms, three photographs - two measuring 3.5×4.5 and one 2×3 - and a 750-denar payment for student services. Three photographs in three different sizes, in 2026.

Who waits in the shade and who in the sun

The difference between faculties is not small. At some of them, future first-years sat and waited in air-conditioned lecture halls. At others they stood outside, in the sun, fanning themselves with their own documents while queueing at the student affairs desk. The biggest crush was at the Faculty of Medicine, which admits the most students - 950.

Student organisations have spent years asking for paper documents to be scrapped entirely and electronic index books introduced. The demand is not extravagant. The obstacle, according to the deans, is specific and solvable: secondary school certificates need to be in electronic form for the whole process to be digitised.

That is one item. One ministry. No new law is needed to do it.

The figure that says something else

This year enrolment quotas were cut by 2,000 places across all universities. The biggest cuts hit business and administration and the Faculty of Law - the explanation being that results showed high unemployment among graduates of those programmes. In technical fields, IT, mechanical engineering and construction the quotas stayed almost identical, because employability there reaches 98-99 percent.

That is a decision based on data, and it is correct. It is just worth noting what it means: for years the state enrolled thousands of students in programmes that graduate them straight into unemployment, and the correction is only arriving now.

The final ranking list comes out on 27 August, enrolment of accepted students is on 3 and 4 September, the second round is on 10 and 11 September, the third on 23 September. The academic year begins on 1 October.