Half of the university students in the state do not get into the degree program they requested as their first choice.

BarcelonaThis is the main fear of the tens of thousands of students who take the university entrance exams each year: not getting the grade that will open the doors to studying the university degree they wantHowever, a new report has quantified this concern: last year, almost half of all university students in Spain did not get into their first-choice degree program. Specifically, according to the study by the Knowledge and Development Foundation (CyD), 245,226 places were offered for undergraduate degrees at public universities in the 2024-2025 academic year, an offer that received 474,319 first-choice applications. Therefore, last year, 229,053 students across Spain were unable to get into their first-choice program. Behind this figure lie two key factors, also highlighted in the report. On the one hand, the document points out that the number of degree programs offered at public universities has remained stable in recent years, and on the other hand, that the demand for university admission has grown by 26% in the last decade nationwide. "Public universities offering in-person instruction show a mismatch between supply and demand: while applications for undergraduate degrees increased by 25.9%, the number of available places decreased slightly (-0.6%)," the study's authors report.

Three applicants per place

They also insist that this trend has led to higher occupancy rates, "reducing students' access to their first-choice field of study." In this regard, the report highlights how last year the occupancy rate for university places for newly admitted students—those entering university for the first time through pre-registration—reached 94.4%, the highest percentage in ten years. Analyzed by field, the sectors where demand for university degrees has grown the most are health sciences (especially nursing and medicine) and computer science and sciences (particularly in the subfield of mathematics and statistics, followed by physics and chemistry). The only field where university demand has fallen is arts and humanities. In fact, the study also warns that there are more than 30% of fields in public universities where there is less than one applicant per available place. However, they denounce that "the public offering is insufficient to meet the demand" in the fields of health, computer science, and science, where there are more than three applicants per place, which "encourages a transfer to private universities and deepens social inequalities."