Antoni Vera avoids leaning between the UIB and the CEU: “As of now... I do not know”

PalmaThe Minister of Education and Universities, Antoni Vera, avoids taking sides between the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) and the Beato Luis Belda University Center, affiliated with CEU San Pablo, when asked where he would study Medicine if he had to choose between the two institutions today. "As of now... I don't know," replies Vera. The minister argues that these are two projects that are at very different stages: "The CEU has just started in the Balearic Islands and needs maturation, while the UIB has been around for many years."

Vera's response comes at a particularly significant moment for medical studies in the Balearic Islands. This academic year, the CEU Beato Luis Belda has begun its university activity in Mallorca with the Medicine degree, which offers 55 places, in addition to Nursing, Physiotherapy, and Psychology. The project plans to progressively expand its offering with new health sciences studies and, in the longer term, in the field of humanities. The new private center thus enters an area that until now had the UIB as its main benchmark, which launched its Medicine studies in the 2016-2017 academic year. Over these ten years, the public faculty has consolidated its structure and ties with the public hospitals of the Balearic Islands, especially with Son Espases, but also with Son Llàtzer. Both are university hospitals.

Precisely, Vera focuses on this relationship between the university and the healthcare system when explaining his response. “The UIB Faculty of Medicine is viable today thanks to our decree that facilitates the compatibility between the healthcare professionals' assistance activity and teaching,” he points out. The decree to which the minister refers allows for facilitating that healthcare professionals who work in the public system can combine their assistance activity with university teaching. The measure, therefore, affects one of the elements that the Government considers necessary to guarantee the availability of healthcare professionals who also serve as professors at the UIB Faculty of Medicine.

More supply, more competition

The emergence of the CEU has introduced a new element into this university map. The center's Medicine degree has begun the academic year with all places filled and with a majority of students coming from the Balearic Islands (with a good number of alumni from charter and private schools). The university maintains that its establishment allows for expanding the supply of places to train future doctors and contributes to addressing the need for healthcare professionals. The Dean of Medicine at CEU San Pablo, Tomás Chivato, has argued that the project does not arrive to compete with the UIB, but to respond to the shortage of professionals. The institution has also championed its own teaching model, with a special commitment to clinical simulation and practical training.

The implementation of the CEU, however, has also opened a debate about the growth of private universities in the Balearic Islands and about the university model that is intended to be consolidated in the Balearic Islands, where companies are also elbowing their way in to offer vocational training degrees at prices unaffordable for many families. The Beato Luis Belda project has received significant institutional support and the Government has declared the implementation of the center as strategic. The new university has also begun with dimensions still very different from those of the UIB. While the CEU has just started its activity in Mallorca, at the old Riskal and the Son Serra Parera estate, the public university has accumulated decades of academic and research structure and is the only public university in the Islands.

Vera defends one of the decisions adopted by his department: the decree that, according to him, has contributed to making the UIB Faculty of Medicine viable today. The coexistence between the two models will be one of the elements that will mark the coming years of higher education in the Balearic Islands, especially in health studies. With the CEU already in operation, the UIB will have to share the Medicine offer for the first time with a consolidated private university with an established name that is now landing in Mallorca.