Date: January 7, 2023 Time: 10:10:54
The trends of recent years indicate that more and more students in Spain are enrolling in private universities, in contrast to the loss of weight of the public sector which, nevertheless, continues to prevail in the majority of the student body. Although in the degrees the difference is wider between both sectors, in the master’s degrees the ‘sorpasso’ of private education is increasingly closer.
This is clear from the ‘CyD 21-22 Report’ published by the CyD Foundation, chaired by Ana Botín and dedicated to the analysis and promotion of the contribution of universities to the economic and social development of Spain. In it, it can be seen how the number of students enrolled in Spanish public degrees has gone from representing 85.7% of the total distribution they occupied in the 2016-2017 academic year to 82.3% in the 2020-2021 academic year, while private degrees have reduced the difference with enrollment growth from 14.3% to 17.8% during the same period.
However, what stands out the most in the report is the evolution of the number of students enrolled in master’s degrees in the private sector. Here, the data indicates that the roadmap of private universities involves concentrating their commitment to master’s degrees. In the 2020-2021 academic year, almost 44% of the students who studied their master’s degree did so in private classrooms, a far cry from the 34% who studied it five years ago. Equality is even greater in the number of graduates, -students who pass their subjects but have not received the degree-, where private institutions supported 47% of the students in the 2020-2021 academic year.
This increased prominence of private universities is understood by the promotion of distance studies, which provide the largest number of students in this sector. During the analyzed period, the remote modality has grown in this area from 16% to 24%, while in public institutions it has hardly changed until it fell below 4%. The figures confirm that the strong point of the private sector are the courses where the student carries out his training outside the classroom, for the sake of greater flexibility when comparing his studies.
Distribution by age and gender
Other conclusions that stand out from this study point to the fact that university students are increasingly taking postgraduate courses later, so that the majority of them are between the ages of 25 and 30 (36.2%), followed by students under 25 years of age (34.3%). %), which have fallen by 3% in five years. By gender, women are imposed in number. In both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, female students represent close to 56% of the total, after having strengthened their presence in the five years analysed.
