“Coming to study here was the best decision I could have made: the people are nice, I speak another language, and above all I study what I want”, explains, convinced, Valentine Llobel, a 19-year-old Avignonnaise, in front of the public library of Villanueva de la Cañada. This bourgeois city of 20,000 inhabitants, surrounded by vast fields, located 30 kilometers from Madrid, hosts the campuses of two private universities: the small and family-run Camilo José Cela University (UCJC), located about ten kilometers from the city center , in the Villafranca del Castillo housing estate, and the Alfonso X el Sabio University (UAX), a behemoth that covers 100 hectares at the entrance to Villanueva.
Easier to access than in France, health studies are taken by storm there every year by hordes of young French people, like Valentine Llobel. Having come to revise for the January exams, this student, in her first year of physiotherapy (physiotherapy) at the UCJC, nevertheless does not hide his stress in the face of the difficulty of the courses and his stumbling Spanish.
A little further on, two Toulousians are also working on their lessons, but in dentistry. “We have the feeling of being privileged compared to many friends who have had to reorient themselves”, acknowledges Thomas Grima, 21, a dental student at UAX. University fees, on the other hand, exceed 17,000 euros per year. “But we pay for the chance to continue our studies, we don’t pay for our diplomawishes to specify his comrade Thibault Perrichet, 19 years old. The courses are at least as difficult as in France, and they are in Spanish. »
According to the latest figures from the Spanish Ministry of Universities, during the 2021-2022 school year, 11,400 French students enrolled in Spanish universities, excluding Erasmus and master’s programs. A number that continues to rise. Nearly 8,800 of them did so in private faculties, where they are by far the most represented foreign community, whereas there were “only” 6,900 at the start of the 2018 academic year, an increase of 27% in three years.
Easier to access
Selected on file, fairly brief Spanish test and motivational interview, they offer themselves a second chance to carry out the studies of their dreams for a price that can vary between 9,000 and 14,000 euros per year in physiotherapy and up to 20 000 euros the year in dental. Before that, they often prepared, without success, for the medicine “competitions”, during a painful and ultra-selective year of the Specific Health Access Course (Pass).
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