Spain's veterinary oversupply leaves under 40% earning €1,500

Veterinary faculties triple while under 40% earn €1,500

Spain has fifteen more veterinary faculties than France, Germany and England combined. The market cannot employ even half of the more than 1,800 graduates who leave university each year. Yet classrooms continue to fill up. This university paradox is not a dinner-table hypothesis: it is a mechanism that repeats itself course after course, with veterinary science serving as the perfect case study and humanities degrees acting as the backdrop.

The veterinary case: triple the faculties and salaries below €1,500

The latest available survey presents the data without embellishment: fewer than 40% of Spanish veterinarians earn €1,500 or more. More than 1,800 students graduate annually, but the market barely absorbs half of them. The World and European Veterinary Associations state that four or five faculties are sufficient for healthy development; Spain accumulates fifteen more than France, Germany and England combined. Over twenty years, the number of faculties has tripled.

Another piece of data dismantles the myth of cold calculation: 80% of veterinary students are women. If career choice were based on profitability analysis, no family would sign up for six years of effort only to end up earning a low salary. But the decision is driven by other factors.

Why do young people choose degrees with high unemployment?

At seventeen or eighteen, information is scarce and bias is enormous. One school of thought argues that at this age there is simply not enough maturity to decide the rest of one’s life; another points to something more uncomfortable: university has become a parking lot where adolescence is prolonged while someone else pays for accommodation.

In between survives a phrase repeated until exhaustion, which has caused hard-to-measure damage: "Study what you like, and you will work in your field." The result is a country with overflowing humanities degrees and technical qualifications that fail to fill their places, despite labor demand pulling in the opposite direction.

Civil service exams, the magnet explaining half of enrollments

A large part of the student body does not seek private employment. They seek a degree that qualifies them for civil service entrance exams (oposiciones), and for that purpose, any degree works, preferably an easy one. This is why teaching degrees and related fields function as gateways to public administration while students prepare for common exam topics.

The underlying problem is that this calculation only works up to a point: there are not enough positions for everyone. Those who look at medicine entry scores—which hover around 9 out of 10—and fall short, often end up settling for degrees where the title is a formality and the career path remains uncertain.

The myth of guaranteed career prospects

Even degrees marketed by official narratives as safe are not immune. Business Administration (ADE) and Economics degrees accumulate graduates struggling to place their diplomas; some end up working as clerks with a Master’s in Finance under their belt. Saturation, it is argued, extends to almost everything except medicine and nursing, where passion and excellent grades are also required.

The technical route nobody advertises

Against all this, vocational training and trades are championed as the option that actually fits the market. Skilled electricians, plumbers, plasterers or carpenters are scarce, and the best ones can set prices and choose clients. A higher-level cycle, a year of specialization, and then a simple civil service exam: this itinerary, increasingly defended, avoids six years of university and subsequent disillusionment. The breakdown of this path, with names and ages, sparks the most debates.

Without industry, there are no technical degrees to save

The narrative of passion clashes with a structural fact: Spain dismantled much of its industry and continues to invest little in research and development. Many scientists and engineers end up seeking abroad what they cannot find here, chaining together scholarships and precarious contracts. The question is not what to study, but whether the country has anywhere to place what its universities teach.

With these numbers, the rational choice would be different. The doubt is whether anyone explains this to a seventeen-year-old before they sign their enrollment, or if we continue letting cutoff scores and chance decide for them.