In 2025, private universities achieved a fact historic: they added more master’s students than the public ones. From milestone to milestone, in 2026 there will be a overtaking even greater and that few would have ventured 20 years ago. For the first time, in Spain there will be more private than public campuses. What big turnaround do you expect at the university?
The university sector is agitated as it mutates towards privatization promoted by the autonomous communities in recent years. At the moment the 50 public campuses exceed the 48 private ones, but with several new projects in the pipeline in many communities, that balance will fall sooner rather than later. The Ministry of Education or the different autonomous communities have at least ten new proposals on the table, some of them quite advanced in their processing taking advantage of the previous, more lax regulations, and the regional governments, ultimately and solely responsible for the decision (until October), are approving new centers even though there are serious doubts about the solvency of some projects.
One example among many: the International University for the Development of Extremadura (Uninde), the first private in the region, is one of the latest and most illustrative cases that are paradigmatic of the practices that have been carried out and that forced the ministry to intervene: it was validated by the Executive of María Guardiola (PP) with the procedure not completed, with an initial capital of 3,000 euros and with a devastating negative report from the Ministry of Universities.
None of that mattered to the Board to give it the go-ahead. With the plug removed, Extremadura is studying three other requests for private campuses. Asturias, the Balearic Islands and Aragon also do it and the Canary Islands, Galicia and Andalusia have recently done it, as well as Madrid, the epitome of privatization. In the last decade, it has been a rare year that a new center has not opened. In 2015 there were 33, today there are 48, while no public one has opened since 1998 (the Polytechnic of Cartagena). Castilla-La Mancha is now the only community that neither has a private university nor is processing any project.
Attack the public, promote the private
Approving a university with unfavorable reports, like Uninde, is not an isolated case. To the Junta de Andalucía, the three negative reports that the Atlantic-Mediterranean Technological University project (Utamed) had did not seem sufficient to deny the license either. Nor that the center was originally promoted by the same counselor, the now deceased Javier Imbroda, who approved the parliamentary procedure. The examples are repeated while those same regional governments that approve universities that only they see as acceptable battle their public campuses.
In Andalusia, precisely, the rectorates of the 10 public universities have been in open confrontation with the regional government for at least a couple of years over the underfunding they claim to receive. The top officials of the centers accuse the Government of Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla of not fulfilling its commitments, of “weakening the system,” and threaten to go to court.
The same, or worse, happens in Madrid. “Worse” if you consider that the community is the richest in Spain and the one that allocates the least money to its public universities while having the highest prices. All political decisions. Isabel Díaz Ayuso (PP), with the help of her predecessors, has one practically bankrupt (the Complutense has had to request a loan from the regional government itself that should finance it organically to compensate for the lack of real financing), another on the way (the Rey Juan Carlos) and is about to process a law that will make this situation chronic, generating more losses in misery. Meanwhile, new private centers are approved (the IE the last one, a month ago) and others are being prepared through the back door for the organization that sided with the president’s partner in the trial against the attorney general for revealing secrets.
The private sector has incentives to bet on the university. In recent years, regional governments of all kinds have generated a perfect storm for the growth of private universities in Spain. The stagnation of public offerings (the 50 state centers today offer a combined three thousand fewer places than ten years ago) as a consequence of insufficient regional funding (university studies are subsidized and, therefore, opening places or degrees costs money), added to the population’s need or desire for training, influenced by an increasingly competitive labor market, fuels private universities for now in an endless rise. Ten years ago they had 178,000 students and were growing at a rate of about 10,000 a year. Today they exceed 300,000 and add 25,000 new ones per year, a figure that is only expected to rise.
The business is sweet: a few years ago this newspaper studied the public accounts of 23 centers (those that published their updated information), which left an average profitability of 9.4%, difficult to find in another sector. Cause-consequence: study credits, mostly to pay for private tuition, have increased by 60% in the last five years. More and more people are going into debt to pay for a degree or master’s degree.
The counterattack
Concerned about this drift and the ineffectiveness of its own Royal Decree, approved just four years ago, La Moncloa decided to tighten the rule and impose more requirements so that opening universities is not at the mercy of the specific interests of a regional Executive. The attempt by the previous minister, Manuel Castells, to bring order was unsuccessful: in the almost five years that the law has been in force, at least 11 new private universities have been approved, and at least four of them passed the filter against the criteria of the ministry’s technicians and the General Conference of University Policy (CGPU), a body that brings together the Government and the autonomous communities and that must assess the quality of each project and whether or not it complies with the regulations.
But these reports are not binding and there are university projects sneaking in that are not what the Government – and the majority of the educational community – understands a university should be: not mere academies that dispense degrees that have come to the fore, Pedro Sánchez dixitbut rather places of knowledge generation that are given to society either through teaching or through the transfer of research. And this is the limping leg of the private sector (with exceptions, such as the University of Navarra).
The tightening approved by the ministry – mandatory for all centers, whether they already exist or not – was well received in the sector, also among private universities. At least that’s what it seemed like initially. The Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE), made up of public and private centers alike, participated in the reform and agreed on the changes with the ministry without known opposition. The plenary session of the Council of Universities, a body where private campuses are also represented, met with the minister and no one made any objection either. Almost everyone in the sector, except the PP, saw the change favorably.
The false endorsement
It was just appearance. Shortly after the Government approved the reform of the Royal Decree, those who opposed took a step forward: the Community of Madrid, the region that is most committed to privatization, the San Pablo CEU University, which is expanding by opening new centers, and Hespérides, an online Canary Islands that fits into what President Pedro Sánchez called “beach bars” and that will have to double its student body to avoid closing, appealed the rule in court. For private universities that do not comply, the new Royal Decree means money. It means changing a model that works for many: specializing in certain training, with a lot of demand, billing and researching little to nothing, an activity that does not generate great dividends.
The Government of Madrid chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the community that treats its public university the worst, believes that the royal decree is “arbitrary”, generates legal uncertainty and invades regional powers. That is, it takes away from the Community of Madrid the power to authorize online universities to give it to Congress, regardless of whether they are located where they are, under the idea that being online they teach throughout Spain.
The San Pablo CEU University also seems to be concerned about the distribution of powers, as it explained. He also created the Catholic Association of Propagandists, owner of the university and editor of the website The Debatethat the Government generates “crispation” and that the new rule is “harmful for a sector that works well in Spain.”
And so good. The sector’s turnover has gone from 2,255 million euros in 2017 to 3,700 million euros in 2023, according to the DBK Informa sector observatory, an increase of 68%. A business on the rise: the CVC fund has just earned about one billion euros (100% of the investment) in just six years with the purchase and sale of the Alfonso Both operations have occurred in the last 18 months and experts anticipate that there will be more: higher education is a highly profitable business that has attracted the attention of funds, already very present in the sector, and which by their very nature have the obligation to generate profits and sell quickly to return money to their investors.
From the CRUE to the private
But privatization does not only come from regional governments and investment funds. Former heads of public universities have been finding accommodation in the private sector in recent years, according to reports The Country. Segundo Píriz changed the rectorate of the University of Extremadura for that of the International Business University of Madrid, Carlos Romo went from Carlos III to Alfonso
The three are among the last five presidents of the CRUE, the body that represents the majority of universities in Spain and the Government’s interlocutor when reforms have to be proposed. The fourth (ignoring the current one, Eva Alcón) is José Carlos Gómez Villamandos, who has not moved to any private center but did change the University of Córdoba for the Department of Universities of the Board, from where he has approved four private centers in Andalusia in less than a year. The last known case of a known change of sides is that of Ricardo Alonso, who managed from the deanship of the Faculty of Law of the Complutense University the assignment of a private center of the Illustrious Bar Association of Madrid to, once approved, become responsible for it.
Source: www.eldiario.es
