Abstract
Discover how the growing demand for higher education in commerce and health is driving French students to Spanish private universities, exacerbating social inequalities and fueling the commodification of education across Europe. With the number of French students in Spanish private universities surging by 27% in just three years, this phenomenon raises critical questions about access to quality education, the role of private institutions, and the future of public higher education in France and Spain. Explore the complex interplay between selective public education systems, the rise of for-profit private training, and the resulting inequality in access to higher education.
Extract
[...] Official data 2022-2023iv Indicate that Spain has 39 private universities, for 50 public establishments, mostly Catholic. They are mostly distributed over five autonomous communities, that of Madrid, Catalonia, Andalusia, Castile and León and the Valencian Community. For the same year, we estimated that 19% of the 2 million students enrolled in Spain in the fields of commerce, administration and law, private and public combined. Effect of windfall observed in France as in Spain: some less scrupulous providers of training have rushed to this lucrative market and deliver diplomas of questionable value. [...]
[...] Finally, even without high tuition fees, the cost of setting up a student for their higher education, often in a different city from their parents, represents a significant budget for families. Scholarship systems allow for partial compensation of these expenses, but they are far from covering the entire cost. In addition, the choice of studying in a private university effectively excludes any possibility of benefiting from a scholarship. This state of affairs translates the failure of various public policies, and not only in the field of higher education, by the way. [...]
[...] More generally, in France as well as in Spain, public higher education has not been able or willing to absorb the increase in the number of national students. The development of private, for-profit higher education is booming in these two countries, at the expense of public universities. The long-term risk is, of course, that states outsource a large part of their higher education provision to private organizations, or even beyond their borders, a quick fix that limits public spending on training and costs for taxpayers, particularly during periods of heightened budgetary austerity such as the one France is currently experiencing. [...]
[...] As a French high school student living in Spain, I therefore questioned the origin and consequences of this phenomenon that also affects higher education in commerce, which concerns me, and questions the choices of Spain and France in terms of higher education policy on their respective territories. During the 2021-2022 academic year French students were enrolled in degree programs at Spanish universities, to which can be added students from Erasmus programs or the dispositif for the masters. In 2022, for example, Spain trained 502 dentists who then settled in France, a figure that has been increasing significantly in recent years. These figures reflect a growing trend of French students choosing Spain for their health studies, with a similar trend for commerce fields. [...]
[...] The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Ms. Shaheed, warned in June 2023 that "the commodification of education is a barrier to equality and a challenge to the quality of educational content, with an amplification of the risks resulting from the growth of digital technology in this field." We can fear that the current global economic context at the state level will accentuate these trends of substitution of public universities concerned with the general interest for private providers whose training offer is primarily driven by the logic of profit. [...]
