Although Spain is lagging behind in bilingualism and it is private institutions that have made the most progress in that regard, public universities are now expanding their offerings. Spanish academia finds it hard to be polyglot. Despite the recognized need for attracting international students, courses and programs in English are still limited.

The public universities that have programs in English are in the minority, while some private schools offer them in a systematic manner,” asserts Jordi Olivella, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. “The problem of the scarcity of courses in the business language par excellence is deep-rooted; one has to search for the cause at the formative schooling level, where students do not achieve the proficiency necessary to tackle content at the university level,” opines the President of Schiller International University, Manuel Alonso Puig.

The private institution Mr. Puig represents bases its instruction in English because its aim is to educate students in the understanding of diverse cultures and help them grow professionally in the international sphere, and he maintains that this goal can only be attained by interacting with persons of different nationalities. To achieve the stated goal, Schiller administers three campuses in the United States and five in Europe, and students may move freely among them each semester. “This is full scale international immersion,” Mr. Puig explains. Almost all the courses in the Schiller syllabus contain the word “international.” The university specializes in Business Administration, International Relations, Global Economics, and Tourism. Undergraduate courses range around 9,000 Euros each, while graduate courses are about double that amount.

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