Editorial

The importance of a preposition. Why the staff model at Catalan universities must be preserved

Francesc Xavier Grau, president of AQU Catalunya

The data show that the SUC is a strong university system within the overall Spanish system: it attracts students, researchers and teaching staff, it is open by nature and it is the most internationally competitive of all Spanish university systems.

People from both the Spanish and Catalan university systems, and even outsiders, have sometimes asked me why, in my opinion, the Catalan university system (SUC) is the best university system in Spain. Before answering, we must first establish whether this is actually the case. Is the SUC the best university system in Spain? In what ways?

The data below support this. It compares Spain as a whole, Catalonia and the Madrid Region (given that it benefits from Madrid’s capital status) in terms of human, economic and scientific aspects, ranking positions and internationalisation.

Population and GPD

The regions generating the most wealth in Spain are Catalonia and Madrid, which are also two of the most populous regions (only behind Andalusia).

Madrid’s contribution to GDP is slightly higher, but very similar to Catalonia’s. In contrast, Catalonia has twice the industrial GDP of Madrid. Catalonia is, therefore, relatively wealthy in the Spanish context, with the highest levels of manufacturing in Spain.

(Year: 2023)	Spain	Catalonia	% CAT/SP	Madrid Region	% Madrid Region/ESP
Population	48,085,361	7,901,963	16.4 %	6,871,903	14.3 %
GDP (millions of €)	1,498,324 M€	281,845 M€	18.8 %	293,069 M€	19.6 %
Industrial GDP (millions of €)	220,604 M€	47,822 M€	21.7 %	22,609 M€	10.2 %

Universities

The SUC is relatively compact, with a percentage of public and private universities compared to the total for Spain that is well below Catalonia’s share of the population and GDP. In comparison, Madrid has seen disproportionate growth in the number of private universities, linked to the capital status effect, attracting many students from almost all over Spain (practically none from Catalonia). In terms of the number of students, the SUC is the second largest system in Spain, only behind Madrid, with a disproportionately high number of students given the overall population size. The number of students in the SUC is also higher than Catalonia’s population share, but by a narrower margin. In any case, the SUC attracts local students, students from the rest of Spain and international students, at all educational levels.

(Year: 2023)		Spain	Catalonia	% CAT/SP	Madrid Region	% Madrid Region/SP
Universities	Public	50	7	14.0 %	6	12.0 %
	Private	41	5	12.2 %	13	31.7 %
	Total	91	12	13.2 %	19	20.9 %
Students	Undergraduate degree programmes	1,378,824	237,870	17.3 %	254,687	18.5 %
	Master’s degree programmes	288,955	49,560	17.2 %	56.932	19.7 %
	Doctorate programmes	94,680	16,113	17.0 %	18.184	19.2 %
	Total	1,762,459	303,543	17.2 %	329,803	18.7 %

Public funding

Public funding for the SUC is significantly lower, given Catalonia’s demographic and economic size. We see the same in the Madrid Region.

(Year: 2022) (millions of €)	Spain	Catalonia	% CAT/SP	Madrid Region	% Madrid Region/SP
Public funding (2022) (M of €) Current transfers to universities	7,633 M€	1,121 M€	14.7 %	1,094 M€	14.3 %

Scientific output

Despite clearly insufficient public funding, the scientific output of the SUC is the highest in Spain. Most of this production (92.5%) is found in public universities. Furthermore, this production has a significantly higher impact, 28% above the Spanish average. Comparatively, the scientific output at Madrid universities is proportionate to the region’s economic performance (and the concentration of large companies in Madrid), and the impact level is only 6.5% higher than the Spanish average.

Scimago 2024 (2019-2023)	Spain	Catalonia	% CAT/SP	Madrid Region	% Madrid Region/SP
Total	599,508
Public univ. (agg.)		151,695	25.3%	109,035	18.2%
Private univ. (agg.)		12,471	-	15,683	-
All univ. (agg.)		164,166	27.4%	124,718	20.8%
Norm. impact Total	1.23
Norm. impact Pub. univ.		1.45	-	1.33	-
Norm. impact Priv. univ.		1.59	-	1.31	-
Norm. impact Univ. agg.		1.58	-	1.31	-

University rankings

It is widely acknowledged that global university rankings are oversimplifications with certain biases. QS, THE and ARWU are by far the most commonly used rankings, and there are significant differences between them. However, there are also strong correlations, and the best universities tend to rank highly in all three. In this case, we counted the number of universities that rank among the top 200, 500 and 1,000 in any of the three and, as a more consistent measure, in all three simultaneously. Three Catalan universities and two in Madrid are in the top 200 of one of the rankings, but only one, a Catalan university, appears in all three. In the top 500, five Catalan universities (31%) and four Madrid universities (25%) out of a total of sixteen Spanish universities appear in one of the rankings, and three Catalan universities (75%) and one from Madrid (25%) are the only ones present in all three. Practically the whole SUC (with the exception of the smallest university in the system), accounting for over 99% of its student body, ranks in the top 1,000 in at least one ranking, and six universities, all public, are in all three. Catalan universities, then, account for a large number of the Spanish universities that appear in all these rankings.

(Year: 2023)		Spain	Catalonia	% CAT/SP	Madrid Region	% Madrid Region/SP
Rankings (THE, QS or ARWU)	Top 200	5	3	60.0 %	2	40.0 %
	Top 500	16	5	31.3 %	4	25.0 %
	Top 1000	43	11	25.6 %	6	14.0 %
Rankings (THE, QS and ARWU)	Top 200	1	1	100.0 %	-	0.0 %
	Top 500	4	3	75.0 %	1	25.0 %
	Top 1000	22	6	27.3 %	5	22.7 %

Grants

Since their creation in 2007, the European Research Council (ERC) Grants awarded to individual researchers have been interpreted as one of the main indicators of excellence in research. In this period, 1,105 research projects funded by the ERC have been awarded to Spain. Of these grants, 479 have been awarded to Spanish universities, 216 (45%) of them to Catalan universities, while 76 correspond to Madrid universities (16%, proportionate to the Madrid Region’s demographic and economic size). Including research centres and universities, a total of 491 projects (44% of the total) have been carried out in Catalonia. Catalan universities and research centres are even more dominant within Spain as a whole when it comes to excellence rather than just scientific output.

ERC grants (2007-2024)	Spain	Catalonia	% CAT/SP	Madrid Region	% Madrid Region/SP
To universities	479	216	45.1 %	76	15.9 %
Total	1,105	491	44.4 %	-	-

Foreign teaching staff

Finally, as a measure of the system’s openness and international reach, the percentage of foreign teaching staff at universities was examined. More than a third of foreign teaching staff working in Spain are employed at Catalan universities, where they account for 6.5% of the total teaching staff, almost double the Spanish average and also double the figure for Madrid, despite the city’s attractiveness.

(Year: 2023)	Spain	Catalonia	% CAT/SP	Madrid Region	% Madrid Region/SP
Total number of foreign professors	4,783	1,595	33.3%	1,044	21.8%
% sobre total professorat	3.49 %	6.53 %	-	3.60 %	-

Conclusions

In summary, the data show that the SUC is a strong university system within the overall Spanish system: it attracts students, researchers and teaching staff, it is open by nature and it is the most internationally competitive of all Spanish university systems.

And now the answer. Why do I think this is the case? Of course, it is a complex system shaped by multiple interconnected factors. It is difficult to give a direct, straightforward answer. With that caveat out of the way, I believe there are three main reasons:

A highly developed, stable, coordinated, collaborative and yet competitive university structure. The creation of the Inter-University Council nearly fifty years ago, reinforced by the Catalan Universities Act (LUC) in 2003, has resulted in a shared, consistent and robust policy approach to universities. At the same time, the funding system, crisis aside, has fostered healthy inter-university competition.
Catalonia has always been active in European Union politics. Especially in the last 25 years, with the implementation of the Bologna Process and the development of various quality assurance processes, Catalan universities have been present in all forums and have been at the forefront of all the improvements introduced. A Catalan rector, Josep Maria Bricall, spearheaded and chaired the Confederation of European Union Rectors’ Conferences, the precursor to the European University Association, which is now chaired by another Catalan rector, Josep Maria Garrell. Recently, the Catalan universities have also played a leading role in European partnerships.
This brings me to what I believe is the key factor: the dual teaching staff model, developed through the LUC (2003). The 2001 Framework Act on Universities (LOU) opened the door to hiring tenured teaching staff as permanent employees with university contracts, not civil servants, but only Catalonia, and to a lesser extent the Basque Country, fully embraced this possibility. In the rest of Spain, the new category was used to define a lower rank, prior to achieving civil servant status as a professor. In Catalonia, it was proposed as a completely parallel and alternative pathway, promoted by a specific plan, the Serra Húnter Plan. This approach has paid off, as we can see from the results. Serra Húnter staff have attracted 37% more resources than other staff who joined Catalan universities during the same period; they are 28% more likely to be principal investigators and 18% more successful in gaining recognition for their research work. In an already competitive environment, these kinds of contracts have helped to promote the system and to enhance its quality.

This final factor setting us apart, the Catalan teaching model, is currently under threat due to a potential misinterpretation of the Framework Act on the University System (LOSU). If Spain’s National Agency of Quality Assessment and Accreditation moves towards establishing the same accreditation criteria for hired staff and civil servants, these “in-house” profiles in Catalonia will be undermined.

Civil servants are defined as members of a “national corps”; that is, one works as a professor at a university, while the alternative categories in Catalonia mean that someone is a professor of the university. This seemingly minor semantic difference reflects a crucial cultural difference in how these professionals view their relationships with their respective universities.

As our experience for over twenty years has proven, the existence of teaching staff with university contracts does not jeopardise academic freedom or the stability the teaching staff needs to work effectively. Therefore, we may want to reconsider these “national corps”, but we will leave this for future legislation on universities.