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Spain Higher Education
In the late 1980s, Spain had thirty-four universities,
four
of which were run by the Catholic Church (three by Jesuits
and
one by Opus Dei). Although the Catholic universities
enrolled
only 30,000 of the country's 900,000 students, they were
highly
regarded, especially by conservative, middle-class
Spaniards, and
therefore they exerted an influence in higher education
far out
of proportion to their size. The two largest and most
respected
state universities, the Complutense in Madrid, which by
the late
1980s enrolled about 100,000 undergraduates, and the
Central in
Barcelona, which had about 80,000, together accounted for
almost
20 percent of all university students.
Until the 1980s, the universities were under the direct
control of the central government's Ministry of Education
and
Science. In 1983 the Socialist government passed the Law
on
University Reform (Ley de Reforma Universitaria--LRU),
which
weakened central government control over universities and
gave
increased autonomy to each public university. Universities
were
relatively free to offer new programs and to restructure
themselves internally so long as they met the
qualifications
imposed on all state universities. The law also weakened
(at
least on paper) the control of the universities that had
been
exercised by the catedraticos, the senior
professors who
held the highly prestigious chairs in each department. The
new
law provided that control of the universities would shift
to the
claustro constituyente or university council made
up of
professors of all ranks, as well as administrators, staff,
and
occasionally, for certain purposes, students.
The university system offered two distinct tracks that
emphasized either academic or vocational subjects.
Students could
pursue a five-year or a six-year course of study in the
liberal
and professional programs offered by the conventional
facultades (pl., sing., facultad) or departments,
or a
three-year program at the escuelas universitarias,
which
offered training in nursing, teaching, and other less
elite
professions. Not surprisingly, the degrees offered by the
escuelas usually had a lower status than those
given in
the more traditional academic programs.
Spain's universities grew even more rapidly during the
1960s
than the elementary and secondary schools; enrollments
increased
from 77,000 to 241,000 between 1960 and 1972. The 1970
General
Law on Education prescribed that each student completing
the
bachillerato course should have a university place
available to him or to her, but by the mid-1970s the
government
reintroduced entrance exams to slow the explosive growth
of the
university system. Growth continued nevertheless, and by
the
1986-87 academic year, the universities enrolled about
900,000
students. Of these, about two-thirds were studying in the
traditional facultades and the rest, in the more
applied
programs in the escuelas.
In the late 1980s, Spain had the second highest ratio
of
university students to population in Western Europe, yet
spending
per student was only one-third of the West European
average,
leading to poorly paid faculty (the average university
professor
earned only slightly more than US$21,000 per year) and
inadequate
facilities, such as laboratories and libraries. Only a few
of the
more modern universities had student residences or
dormitories;
students at the older, urban universities lived at home or
in
apartments with other students. Instruction emphasized
rote
memory rather than independent analysis, and university
faculties
rarely combined research and teaching. In addition, the
university system seemed poorly attuned to the needs of
the rest
of the country because it was preparing far too many young
people
for career fields already filled to overflowing (medicine,
for
example) and far too few for the jobs needed in an
advanced
industrial society, such as those involving computers and
information science.
To a much greater degree than was true for elementary
and
secondary education, higher education tended to perpetuate
longstanding social cleavages. Writing in 1985, Minister of
Education
and Science Maravall observed that 10 years earlier, 66
percent
of the children of university-educated parents were able
to
attend university, while only 3 percent of the children of
parents with just a primary education had had this
opportunity.
In 1980 children of parents in the upper education levels
were
twenty-eight times more likely to enter a university than
were
children of unskilled workers. Even after a decade of
education
reform, most university students depended completely on
their
parents for support through the end of their studies. The
country's high unemployment rate, as well as the tradition
that
university students did not work while completing their
studies,
meant that few students could pay their own education
costs. The
country still lacked programs of scholarships and student
subsidies that would enable education expenses to be borne
by
society as a whole. The result was that a university
education
was largely the privilege of the middle and the upper
classes. To
some degree, the same was true of the place of women in
higher
education. Although in 1984 about 47 percent of the
country's
university enrollment was female (a figure higher than
that in
most other countries in Western Europe), relatively few
women
went on to become university professors. The majority of
university-educated women continued to pursue the
professions
traditionally open to them, especially pharmacy,
journalism, and
teaching at the elementary and the secondary levels.
Data as of December 1988
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