Education has become a sacred cow of the welfare state. It is invoked to justify any expense and any rule, and debating its privatization sounds like heresy. Yet economics teaches that if we want development, productivity, and higher wages, higher education must operate in an open, competitive market, like any other industry. Education is a sacred cow that the Spanish government seeks to further protect and venerate through this new decree, when universities should instead be competing freely rather than being coddled by the state.
University decree
Spain has a bureaucratic habit of issuing a decree when something does not work. Now the Government wants to expand university rules with a fast-track regulation that sets, among other gems, a minimum of 4,500 students per institution, 75 percent of the faculty residing in Spain, at least 20 research projects in five years, and a ban on continuing to operate if less than 80 percent of places in each degree are filled.
Imagine a degree in biomedical data analysis with 30 students per year and a 95 percent placement rate. With the obligation to fill 80 percent of seats and the push to exceed 4,500 students, that program would be penalized for not growing, precisely because it protects its quality with small cohorts. This decree will be punishing.
You only need to look abroad to see how absurd this is. Small, very selective, excellent centers would be excluded because of their size or structure. Anyone who knows the international ecosystem knows that many top colleges and specialized universities would be incompatible with this mold, such as Caltech, Olin College, the University of Buckingham, many colleges at Oxford, and Jacobs University Bremen, among others. The message of the decree seeks less diversity — both institutional and intellectual — and more obedience.
Also, if this decree is imposed, private universities will most likely adapt to the thresholds by market agility, multiplying programs and lowering prices to clear the 4,500-student bar. Those extra students would not appear out of thin air, they would be students who stop enrolling in public universities. So the government’s attempt to harm private universities would likely end up harming public universities.
Furthermore, in this case the project clashes with the principles of Spanish law and the European Union. Article 27 of the Spanish Constitution recognizes educational freedom, and the EU recognizes the free movement of workers.
University regulation
Students at private universities pay twice. They pay taxes to support the public university, and they also pay tuition at the institution they choose. Even so, those in power caricature them as privileged people who “buy” degrees and threaten the working class. In reality, they are simply acting as consumers who vote with their wallets for different teaching projects. If private universities grow, it is because millions of families value what they offer.The Government’s response is not to compete on quality but to dig in behind regulation. In public systems, when something does not work, money is injected and another layer of rules is created, whereas in the private sphere, when something does not work you close, pivot, or go bankrupt.
In an environment with minimal state regulation, if a university gave away degrees it would be known right away. Firms talk, technical tests expose graduates, and private accreditors and rankings would call it out. Companies would stop hiring these students or would demand extra filters, which would drive good students away from that center, causing a drop in enrollments, sponsorships, and partnerships. The university would be forced to raise standards or close.
The accumulation of degrees
Titulitis (credentialism) is the overvaluation of degrees and certificates as a guarantee of real knowledge. It happens when certification replaces evidence of competence, when passing courses is confused with knowing how to do things, and when the entire knowledge signal depends on a state seal on the accepted degree. The market responds by asking for tests, portfolios, technical challenges, and verifiable track records, because a diploma is no longer enough.
The way forward is as simple as giving the lead back to different university plans with different quality, opening certification to flexible formats, and letting reputation and results separate those who know from those who only collect papers. When we reward skill and honesty, the degree regains value as an informational shortcut and stops being an end in itself.
The knowledge that matters for producing goods and services is not in ministerial offices.It is dispersed across millions of business plans that change every month. That is why the university, if it wants to create valuable human capital, must be a flexible enterprise subject to competitive discipline and price signals. It must be able to experiment with formats, from intensive and modular programs to paths that merely certify self-taught learning. It must be allowed to die if it becomes obsolete, and new universities must be allowed to be born if it spots an opportunity or gap in the market. None of this fits in a scheme that imposes one-size-fits-all rules and quotas and magic numbers, where each problem is “solved” by creating more laws that bring new problems.
Conclusion
Although it would be desirable in my view, it is true that it is practically impossible to eliminate public universities in Spain, but it is possible to end the planning that suffocates the university ecosystem. There is room for autonomous public centers, financed transparently and competing on equal terms with private ones. However in a free society the ministry of education has no right to choose every detail of every university in the country. Excellence emerges when institutions respond to the test of reality and to students’ freedom of choice, not when they obey the latest regulatory whim.
This is why degrees keep losing value. The mass, homogeneous supply of credentials has diluted their signal, leading many to pile up more qualifications. Employers no longer trust the diploma and rely on their own tests, trial periods, and portfolio reviews — yet even then, graduates often prove less prepared, a consequence of universities turning into comfort zones rather than centers of academic excellence. The value shifts from “I have this paper” to “I can do this and I can prove it.” Curing credentialism does not require more regulation. Instead, it requires competition among open and modular certifications, freedom to innovate formats, and freedom to fail if you do not add value. When the university returns to being a firm that produces useful human capital, and assumes the risk of failure, the degree makes sense again. In the meantime, more decrees only mean more paper with less value.
The university must stop being a ritual that legitimizes knowledge — a printer of diplomas and licenses — and become a firm that produces a very specific good, namely, highly specialized human capital.
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