One of the questions I was asked most often as a kid was, What do you want to be when you grow up? I was the first generation to have personal computers at home, so the most common answer (along with astronaut and firefighter) was computer scientist or programmer. Over time, this answer spoke to a whole educational trend that was filling computer science schools.

Since then, a lot of rain has fallen, and over time, student preferences for enrolling in a particular degree have changed a lot. College enrollment data from the past decade highlights the differences between the careers that college students will be studying in 2024 and the careers they were studying a decade ago.

Same student baseData from the official report of the Spanish university system for the 2014-2015 academic year and the 2024 edition show that the total number of university students is similar in both courses, which leaves a good scenario to observe changes in the time preference for choosing a career.

A total of 1,373,300 students were enrolled in both state and foundation universities in the 2014-15 academic year, and 1,375,000 students were enrolled in the 2023-24 academic year.

The most sought-after professions of 2014When looking at the subject areas with the most enrollments in 2014, the majors grouped in Social and Legal Sciences undoubtedly stand out with 640,243 enrollments. This represents 46.6% of students who expressed a preference for careers such as Law, Business Administration and Management, Journalism, Teaching or Human Resources and Labor Relations.

This was followed by 277,968 people enrolled in disciplines grouped under the Engineering and Architecture category. Health Sciences enrolled 245,343 students, while Arts and Humanities hosted 130,963 students. Science was the least popular branch with 84,008 students enrolled.

Records in 2024The first differences between the two periods are starting to show up in the form of a decrease in the number of students enrolled in the branches with the highest student flow. Social and legal sciences continue to be the most in-demand branches, but 16,845 students enrolled in 2024. Surprisingly, the downward trend is accelerating in Engineering and Architecture, which lost 34,612 students compared to a decade ago.

On the other hand, the situation is reversed in the Health Sciences, Literature and Humanities, and Science branches, which accept losing students.

Races that lose the most students. If we go to the data of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities for the period 2015-2023 (the last series it was broken down from), we can further segment which careers have lost the most weight in recent years. We see that the branch that lost the most students was engineering, with a total of 13,069 students, which explains the decline we see in the overall figures for this branch. This decline is also accompanied by a loss of 7,552 enrollments in law and 2,347 in journalism, which justifies the loss of students in the Social Sciences branches in the last decade.

Fastest growing careers in the last decadeConversely, Computer Science is expected to see 16,557 new enrollees in 2024, and healthcare careers are on the rise. Psychology is the leading pick-up in this last category, with 11,695 new enrollees, followed by Nursing with 6,409. Medicine continues to stagnate with a slight rebound, with only 208 more enrollees than a decade ago.

Similarly, it is surprising that courses with low job placements are likely to recover in 2024, such as Humanities, which saw an increase in enrollment by 2,623 students compared to 2015, and Arts, which added 2,748 new enrollees.

At Xataka | The career with the fewest opportunities in Spain: Five years later, employability is still very low

Image | Unsplash (Alexis Brown)