Beyond Medicine: Spain's Universities Expand Health Science Degrees

The competition to study medicine in Spain has become almost impossible. In the 2022-2023 academic year, only one applicant in thirteen secured a place at a public university. The government has since increased enrollment by just over ten percent, funding 706 additional spots to address the coming shortage of doctors, but thousands still find themselves turned away. Private medical schools remain out of reach for most families—tuition runs as high as 21,000 euros per year for a six-year program. Yet Spain's universities have found another path forward. Since 2010, they have held the authority to design their own degree programs independent of government-mandated curricula, and they are now launching an expanding catalog of specialized health science degrees that work alongside traditional medicine: biomedicine, bioinformatics, bioengineering, neuroscience, biotechnology, and others. These programs are attracting not only students genuinely interested in research and technology, but also medicine applicants who could not clear the admissions bar. The cutoff scores for these new degrees are rising sharply as demand intensifies.

The pandemic fundamentally shifted how Spain's universities think about health education. Applications for medicine surged seventy-six percent in the years following COVID-19, but the surge extended beyond medicine itself. Nursing, psychology, and physiotherapy programs all saw dramatic increases in interest. More importantly, the pandemic exposed the critical role that biomedical research plays in solving health crises. Vaccines and treatments did not emerge from clinical practice alone—they came from laboratories where microbiologists, geneticists, bioinformaticians, and bioengineers worked to understand disease and develop solutions. Alfonso Mendoza, a microbiologist, explains the shift plainly: healthcare has become too complex for medicine alone to handle. Research creates the tools that clinical practice then deploys. The new degree programs emerging across Spanish campuses are designed to formalize this reality.

The Universidad Carlos III in Madrid is launching a degree in neuroscience this September—a program Mendoza, who coordinates it, describes as unique in Spain and continental Europe. The curriculum synthesizes three distinct approaches to neuroscience: the study of how the nervous system functions biologically, the examination of behavior and learning, and the development of mathematical models to understand brain mechanics. Teaching will be conducted entirely in English, and the program will admit between thirty-five and forty students in its inaugural year. There is no preliminary cutoff score because this is the first cohort, yet the university has already detected significant interest among high school graduates.

Biomedicine is a more established field, though it is expanding rapidly. Luis Capitán, a surgeon and dean of medicine at one institution, also serves as president of the association of biomedicine and related sciences deans across Spain. When the association formed in 2018, he recalls, its members could fit in a taxi. Now they need a minibus. Seventeen universities now offer biomedicine degrees, and two more have applied for membership. The discipline combines medical and biological knowledge with the explicit goal of translating advances in cellular and molecular biology into clinical applications. Capitán notes that basic science and clinical medicine have historically operated in separate worlds; biomedicine bridges that gap. Graduates show strong employment outcomes—between seventy and seventy-three percent find work within two years of finishing their degree, and many pursue master's programs afterward.

The Universidad de Alcalá de Henares pioneered a related path in 2009 when it split its biology degree into two tracks, creating a specialized program in health biology. The new degree was immediately popular with students and quickly became the university's third most competitive program by admissions score. Today it ranks second, behind only medicine. Daniel Martín Vega, a zoology professor and program coordinator, notes that the university has considered renaming the degree to align with the broader "biomedicine" label now used elsewhere, though it has retained its original name. Graduates can pursue the BIR—a research track equivalent to the medical residency system but designed for biologists—to work in public health institutions, or they can move into biomedical laboratories, clinical labs, or fertility clinics.

As healthcare increasingly intersects with technology, new engineering-focused degrees are emerging. Bioengineering and biomedical engineering programs fuse biology with electrical and communications engineering. Mendoza offers a concrete example: Spain's aging population means more people require prosthetics, and titanium prosthetics are expensive and carry significant responsibility. Doctors once decided whether a prosthetic was properly constructed, but now engineers are increasingly consulted because a prosthetic is ultimately a mechanical component. Engineers can design the piece and verify that the final product matches the original specifications. Students in these programs receive substantial training in computational data processing alongside solid foundations in biology and medicine, preparing them to work with medical devices, software design, bioinformatic algorithms, X-ray imaging, and magnetic resonance technology.

Bioinformatics represents another frontier. At least ten universities will offer the degree beginning this September, including four public institutions in Barcelona that share a single program. At CEU, students can pursue bioinformatics alone or as a double degree with genetics. While there is no enrollment cap, the program expects roughly fifteen students in its first year. Osvaldo Graña, director of the bioinformatics and big data degree, points out that news coverage of medical studies focuses on experimental work but rarely mentions the computational analysts whose work makes those conclusions possible. Precision medicine cannot exist without bioinformatics. When a patient fails to respond to treatment, genetic analysis might reveal a mutation explaining the problem. Data analysis can also predict disease by identifying patterns that suggest lifestyle changes. Graña himself spent eight years in formal education—studying biology and technical computer engineering—but he believes four years is sufficient for students to master the field. The demand for these skills is only growing.