Relocate, Merge or Stay: Institutional Responses to Combat Exposure and Academic Staff Retention in Ukrainian Universities, 2019–2026
This study analyzes how Ukrainian universities' strategic choices to relocate, merge, or remain in place following the 2022 Russian invasion differentially impacted staff retention and payroll stability, revealing that while relocation led to gradual workforce reduction, mergers facilitated staff transfer without mass dismissal, suggesting that institutional responses are distinct yet critical determinants of academic staff well-being alongside combat exposure.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
When a university faces a sudden, existential threat, its leaders must decide whether to stay put, move to a new location, or dissolve into a larger neighbor. This is not merely a logistical puzzle; it is a test of how an organization protects the people who work within it. In the study of organizations, there is a long-standing idea that institutions act to preserve their own survival, often prioritizing their legal existence over the well-being of their individual members. Another school of thought suggests that institutions act as reservoirs of resources—jobs, salaries, and professional communities—that they try to keep intact for their staff. When a war breaks out, these two goals can pull in opposite directions. The question becomes: does the choice an institution makes to survive actually determine what happens to the people inside it, or are the fates of the building and the people entirely separate?
A team of researchers set out to answer this question by looking at the Ukrainian university system during the full-scale Russian invasion that began in February 2022. They focused on 179 state-funded universities, tracking them from 2019 through 2025. Instead of relying on surveys where staff might guess how supported they feel, or on official headcounts that were often unavailable, the researchers went directly to the source of the money. They reconstructed the total payroll of every university by analyzing the tax and social security payments recorded in the national treasury. This method allowed them to see the actual number of people being paid, year by year, regardless of whether the university was in a safe city, a war zone, or had moved to a new one. They also mapped exactly which universities stayed where they were, which ones relocated, and which ones were merged into other institutions.
The researchers found that the path a university took was not random; it was largely determined by how big the university was before the war started. The largest institutions had the resources to absorb smaller ones, while the smallest ones were often the ones that were absorbed or closed. The medium-sized universities were the ones that moved. This pattern suggests that when an institution faces an existential threat, its ability to choose a response is limited by its own resources, not just by the pressure of the war itself.
The impact of these choices on the staff was stark and distinct. Universities that stayed in place, even those located in areas with active fighting, managed to recover their payroll numbers by 2025. In nominal terms, their staff counts returned to pre-war levels. However, the universities that chose to relocate faced a different reality. While they kept their legal identity and continued to pay wages, they lost staff gradually over time. By the third year after the move, these relocated institutions had lost about one-third of their payroll compared to where they started. The money did not disappear immediately, but the number of people being paid dwindled as the war dragged on.
The situation for universities that were merged into others was different again. When a smaller university was absorbed into a larger one, the smaller entity stopped paying wages as a separate legal body within a year. However, when the researchers looked at the combined payroll of the larger university and the smaller one it had absorbed, the total number of staff remained steady. This indicates that the staff were not fired; they were transferred to the new parent institution. The cost of the merger was not the loss of jobs, but rather the delay and confusion of the transfer process, which left many staff members in a state of uncertainty for a long time.
The study also explored whether universities that were more active in helping their communities during the war—providing shelter, supporting the military, or aiding displaced people—were better at keeping their staff. The data suggested a link, but not the one one might hope for. The universities that documented the most community support were often the ones that had already recovered their staff numbers. The universities that had lost the most staff, particularly those that had relocated, documented the least amount of community activity. This suggests that having a strong, intact staff is what allows a university to do more for its community, rather than doing more for the community being the thing that saves the staff.
Perhaps the most significant finding is the gap between what happens to the institution and what happens to the individual. Previous surveys of Ukrainian academics had suggested that staff at relocated universities felt better supported and less burned out than those who moved on their own. The payroll data supports this in a way: the people who stayed with the relocated university were indeed kept on the payroll. But the data also reveals the other side of the story: the people who could not or would not follow the university left, and they are no longer counted. The institution survived and kept its remaining staff, but the "bundle" of resources it offered shrank, leaving those who drifted away behind.
This research changes how we should think about wartime decisions. It shows that the choice to stay, move, or merge is not just a strategic administrative act; it is a decision that filters the workforce. A merger order does not necessarily mean job losses, but it does mean a transfer of identity and a period of instability. A relocation order does not mean immediate firing, but it often leads to a slow erosion of the team over several years. The study concludes that to truly understand the human cost of war on education, we must look at both the survival of the institution and the retention of its people as two separate, though related, outcomes. The data proves that an institution can be resilient and still lose a third of its people, and that the people who remain are not the whole story of what was lost.
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