ABSTRACT
In the ten-year period following the election of the PSOE to government in 1982, the number of university students doubled from 669,848 to 1,295,585. Fifty-three per cent of students in 1993-4 study social science and law; 21 per cent, engineering and technology; 10 per cent, humanities; 7.5 per cent, experimental science; 8 per cent, health sciences. Short-course registrations constituted 32.5 per cent of the total. Three out of every 100 inhabitants in Spain study at university, and the number is growing at the rate of 8 per cent a year. Largest universities were the distance-teaching university (UNED) (100,000) and the largest Madrid university, Complutense (126,149). Of the other universities, twenty-three had registrations ranging between 15,000 and 40,000; and sixteen had registrations of less than 15,000. Just over 51 per cent of all students were women (a much higher percentage than for lecturing staff) with a much stronger predominance of women in social sciences, law, the humanities and health. In addition to Spain’s forty-one public universities (of which four began teaching in 1993), there were four Catholic and three other private universities-now permitted by (1991) legislation, on condition that any such private provision offers a minimum of eight degree titles, delivered by a teaching force of whom at least 50 per cent must have doctorates and 60 per cent must be full-time, and that the teacherstudent ratio is no worse than 1:25. Two new private universities for Madrid were approved in 1993. Each autonomous community now has at least one state university, and Andalucia has a university for each of its eight provinces.
