The worrying waning of students in architecture

Rodrigo Almonacid (students from the Valladolid School of Architecture visiting the Roman remains of Tusculum, Italy 2009).

What we have been intuiting for a long time now has now become a confirmed fact. Studying architecture is no longer of interest. Or to be more precise, it is less and less so. Over the last few years, at the beginning of the academic year, a diminishing in the number of students enrolled in Architecture was recorded.¹ It started with a modest drop in demand among future university students who began to choose other courses of study. This phenomenon has perhaps passed us by inadvertently without impacting schools of architecture. The classrooms continued filling up. But no longer with the same type of students. According to sources from the Ministry,² the cut-off grade required for architecture has been dropping year by year, from 8.44 on average for “Architecture and Building” in 2013/14 to 8.26 in 2014/15). Correspondingly, the official cut-off grade for “Technical Drawing II” dropped from 7.56 to 7.33 over the same period.

In demo-geographical terms, students are increasingly “local”, and choose to study courses that can be found in their own cities to avoid the extra cost of studying away from their family’s home added to the high cost of university tuition.  Breaking with the traditional pattern, the choice no longer depends only of the future university student’s tastes and abilities, but on an increasingly decisive economic factor. In the big capital cities (Madrid, Barcelona) this decline affects only the quality but not the quantity of the students admitted because even the crumbs from the major Schools of Architecture can fill their satellite schools in many cases. Contrarily, Schools in more sparsely populated areas feel the pinch, and even more so if the cost of their university credits is very high as compared to other locations, which is occurring in Valladolid. Although it covers 9 provinces in the Regions of Castilla and León, Cantabria and Asturias, the Valladolid School of Architecture had nearly one third fewer students in the 2016/17 academic year. Compare the cost there, 23.34€ per credit (the third most expensive in Spain), with that of Galicia, which costs a mere 11.89€ per credit. Half as expensive. Incredible, isn’t it?

The direct consequence, although I’m afraid we aren’t fully aware of the issue either as it be still be early days, is that students are graduating with a grade point average nearly a full point lower. What was 7.10 in 2009/10 became a 6.67 in 2012/13. In other words, architects are graduating worse prepared to face the most difficult job situation in the history of the profession.  And they are even worse off considering their competitiveness on the professional market and how poorly work is remunerated there. I won’t say that students graduate without being properly prepared, but worse than they were before for a host of reasons that could easily be expounded upon in another post.

There are many justifications for this regression, but more than anything else it owes to the scant amount of available work as an “architect”, i.e. in the traditional sense as a designer of buildings.

This is undeniable. But also undeniable is that neither the schools of Architecture nor the Architects’ Associations have been up to the task of conveying the great breadth of work that architects can do thanks to their specific training.  They have a lot of different potential career paths. This serious oversight needs to be corrected.

Present-day Spanish society has a poor notion of our profession. I’m not saying anything new. And it’s only natural for some parents not to want their children to be just another stigmatised professional amid the crisis. Are we going to just sit waiting with our arms folded? I will finish on a positive note. As the future looks brighter, this is potentially a good time to encourage people to study architecture, right?

Text translated by Beth Gelb