Yesterday's Vanguardia ran profiles of four top-scoring students in June's university access exams, one for each Catalan province. Their marks, out of 10, were 9.65, 9.65, 9.65 and 9.33, and their high school transcripts are likewise stellar. So where will the best and brightest go to school next year? Laura, from Barcelona, will go to law school at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Elisabeth, from Olot (seventy miles from Barcelona), will be starting biomed at the Universitat de Barcelona. Juan, from the town of Tarragona, will start Spanish at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (in Tarragona). It's not clear where Jorge, from Ponts, will study Chemistry. (Apparently he hasn't made up his mind.)
These four students are the top scorers out of over 25,000 who sat the exams. Most university programmes set a pretty low cut-off: 5 is common and I don't know of any over 8. So are these, the best and brightest from Spain's most highly developed economy, headed to Europe's best universities? Or to Spain's best universities? Or abroad? The Pompeu Fabra law school isn't bad, and the U de Barcelona's Faculty of Medicine is among if not the best in Spain, but one wonders if the institutions deserve the students, who have chosen--if that's the word, as the choice is almost made socially before they act--to stay at or very close to home. The best and the brightest could do better.
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