Presence of foreign students at UAB reaches 17.6 per cent

01/02/2016

With 6,527 full-time foreign students, the UAB has this year achieved 17.6% internationalisation in its teaching programmes. In the case of official master's degrees, 40.7% of students are from other countries.

Specifically, this year there are 1,106 foreign students taking official master's degrees, which is a steep rise on last year's figures: over 60%. These students are from 90 different countries, and two trends stand out: an increase in the numbers coming from South America, Asia and the rest of Europe, and diversification of origin, since the UAB is receiving students from around 20 new countries and greater numbers from countries that previously had sent relatively few students.

Internationalisation is especially apparent in master's degrees and graduate studies: apart from the official master's degrees, there are also 1,175 foreign students on UAB-specific master's degrees and 1,464 on PhD programmes. Nevertheless, another 1,469 students from abroad are undergraduates.

In addition, 1,313 students are at the UAB on different exchange programmes and another 2,233 are here on the Study Abroad programme, run by the Fundació UAB (FUAB), which operates independently of the exchange programmes.

Highest in Catalonia

According to a report in the 1 February edition of La Vanguardia, the UAB is the Catalan university with the highest percentage of student internationalisation. It is followed by Ramon Llull University (13.50%), the University of Barcelona (12.50%), Pompeu Fabra University (12.10%), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (11.23%) and Universitat Rovira i Virgili (10%). Taken together, the Catalan universities are above the Spanish average in terms of internationalisation.