Every summer, thousands of Georgian school-leavers sit the Unified National Examinations, rank the university programs they want, and are placed according to their scores. The results are a goldmine of data about what students want, what they can access, and how a whole academic field is structured. This year I pulled together the numbers for one field I care about deeply: psychology.
The 2026 admissions round offered psychology at 24 programs across 21 universities, with 1,707 seats in total. Of those, 1,608 were filled – a sector-wide fill rate of about 94%. Here’s what the data reveals when you look at the whole sector at once.
The Score Hierarchy
The clearest structure in the data is a hierarchy of average enrollee scores. Programs range from an average of 1,984 at the top down to 1,602 at the bottom – a spread of nearly 400 points separating the most and least selective psychology programs in the country.
Average enrollee score by program. State-funded programs shown in green.
Three programs sit clearly at the top: the state universities. Tbilisi State University (TSU) leads at 1,984, followed by Kutaisi International University (KIU) at 1,967, with Batumi State University (BSU) also near the top at 1,881. This isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t only about quality.
For TSU, the pull is a combination of legacy, prestige, and free tuition – it is the oldest and most prestigious university in the country, and its psychology program carries that history. For the other state-funded programs, the main draw is more straightforward: free tuition. When a program costs nothing, it naturally attracts a large pool of strong applicants competing for those funded places, which pushes the entry scores up.
Price and Quality Barely Relate
One might expect that more expensive programs would attract higher-scoring students – that price signals quality. The data shows almost no such relationship.
Annual tuition (₾) against average score, all 24 programs. State-funded programs (green) sit at zero tuition. The CU joint program with a US university sits far right at 21,500 ₾.
The most expensive standard program charges 5,990 ₾ per year and enrolls students averaging 1,883 – below free TSU’s 1,984. A joint program with a US university priced at 21,500 ₾ filled only 2 of its 20 seats. Meanwhile, mid-priced and lower-priced programs are scattered all across the score range.
The likeliest explanation is simple: most applicants cannot pay premium prices, regardless of a program’s quality or ambitions. In a country where the median psychology tuition sits around 3,330 ₾, programs priced far above that are fishing in a very small pond. The clearest evidence is that 21,500 ₾ program filling almost none of its seats. Price, in this market, reflects a program’s business model and positioning far more than it reflects the quality of the students it can attract.
First-Choice Loyalty
Another revealing metric is what share of each program’s enrollees ranked it as their first choice, rather than landing there after missing higher-ranked options.
Share of each program’s enrollees who ranked it first choice.
The pattern tracks the score hierarchy closely. The programs students most want are the same ones with the highest scores: KIU (96%), TSU (91%), and BSU (82%) are overwhelmingly first-choice destinations. Students who can get into these programs chose them deliberately.
At the other end, several programs have very low first-choice shares – one has 0%, meaning not a single enrollee ranked it first. These programs function as fallback or safety options: places students land when they don’t get into their preferred programs. That role is a normal part of any admissions system – not every program can be someone’s dream – but the pattern is stark here, and it lines up almost perfectly with the bottom of the score table.
The Programs That Didn’t Fill
Four of the 24 programs failed to fill all their seats, leaving 99 seats empty across the sector. These tend to be the same programs at the bottom of the score ranking and the first-choice ranking – low demand, low scores, and unfilled capacity all travel together. When a program is nobody’s first choice and sits at the bottom of the score distribution, it also struggles to fill, and the three signals reinforce each other.
So Is Psychology Oversupplied?
Twenty-four programs in a country of under four million people is a lot. It’s tempting to conclude the field is oversupplied. But the fuller picture is more nuanced: demand right now is genuinely high, and so is supply. The sector filled 94% of its seats, which is not the profile of a field nobody wants.
The deeper issue isn’t the number of programs – it’s that many students arrive without a clear understanding of what psychology actually is. A large share of applicants imagine psychology as purely counseling and helping people, without realizing how much the discipline depends on statistics, research methods, and data. And this isn’t a failing specific to psychology programs. It reflects a broader gap: there is almost no professional orientation in Georgian schools to help students understand what different fields actually involve before they commit to them. Students choose psychology with enthusiasm but often without information.
What This Means for Applicants
If you’re a prospective student looking at this data, a few things stand out.
The field is in demand, and that’s a good sign – but choose your program carefully. The single most useful lesson from these numbers is to base your choice on the score level and standing of the university, not on its price. Price tells you very little about quality in this market. A high-scoring, high-demand program signals that strong students competed to get in, which shapes the peer environment you’ll learn in.
And know what you’re signing up for. Psychology is not only counseling and helping people – it heavily uses statistics and data, and the programs that take that seriously will serve you best in the long run. Go in understanding that the science of human behavior is exactly that: a science, built on measurement and evidence. If you choose with that understanding, and choose on quality rather than cost, you’ll be starting from the right place.
Data source: Georgia Unified National Examinations, 2026 admissions round. Figures cover all 24 psychology programs in the 2026 cycle.
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Giorgi Tchumburidze
August, 2026