Engineering degrees top Spain's job rankings, but students keep away

Engineering disciplines occupy seven of every ten places in Spain's top-20 list of degrees ranked by employment outcomes, yet enrolment in those programmes remains stubbornly thin — a structural imbalance that labour economists and industry bodies say is becoming increasingly costly for the economy.

The figures come from a public tool run jointly by Fundación BBVA and the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas (IVIE), operational since 2023 and drawing on data from Spain's National Statistics Institute (INE). The calculator allows prospective students, counsellors and policymakers to compare degree options by projected salary and likelihood of finding work in a related field.

By its measures, engineering qualifications consistently outperform other fields on both indicators. El Mundo, citing the tool's rankings, reported that engineering accounts for roughly 70 percent of the top-20 positions when degrees are sorted by employment rate, a concentration that leaves arts, social science and humanities programmes well down the table despite their far higher intake numbers.

The sector's labour shortfall gives extra urgency to the enrolment gap. El Mundo cited industry estimates that Spain will need to fill approximately 200,000 additional engineering and technology posts over the coming decade, a target that current graduation pipelines are not on course to meet.

The two outlets frame the underlying cause differently. El Mundo placed emphasis on what it described as inadequate careers guidance in secondary schools, arguing that pupils receive too little information about engineering's social relevance — the role engineers play in infrastructure, energy transition and digital industries — before making their higher-education choices. El País foregrounded the role of data transparency, presenting the BBVA-IVIE calculator itself as a corrective: a resource that gives families and students objective salary and employment evidence that was previously hard to access in one place.

Both framings point, from different angles, to an information problem. Whether its root is in school counselling culture or in the opacity of labour-market statistics, the effect is the same: applicants are gravitating toward fields where graduate employment and earnings are considerably weaker.

Spain is not alone in this pattern — similar shortfalls have been documented across much of the European Union — but the country's elevated overall youth unemployment rate sharpens the stakes. A degree choice that leads to stronger job prospects carries heavier weight in a labour market that has historically been harsh on young entrants without specialist qualifications.

What remains unclear is whether improved data access alone will shift behaviour meaningfully, or whether structural changes — including bursaries targeted at under-subscribed engineering programmes, reformed school curricula, or employer-led outreach — will be needed to close the gap before the projected shortfall becomes acute.