Tra\u00e7a said students and academics are forgoing the \u201cmessy, uncertain and\u00a0\u2026 toxic\u201d U.S. for Madrid and Barcelona.<\/p>\n
Latin American students increasingly want to study in Spain amid growing political uncertainty in the U.S., the head of one of Europe\u2019s leading business schools has said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a lot of interest from students from Latin America, who are going to Madrid and Barcelona because America has become more closed off and less accepting,\u201d Daniel Tra\u00e7a, director general of Esade Business School, told\u00a0Times Higher Education.<\/p>\n
Tra\u00e7a said Esade, a business and law school with campuses in Barcelona, Sant Cugat and Madrid, is actively positioning itself to capitalize on the rising interest from students who would have otherwise chosen North America.<\/p>\n
The school is also seeing more students and academics arriving from the U.S. itself, drawn to cities like Barcelona and Madrid at a moment of political turbulence back home.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything is messy, uncertain and becoming toxic,\u201d Tra\u00e7a said. \u201c[Barcelona and Madrid] are large, growing cities with amazing lifestyles, with a sense of freedom and social conscience. We\u2019re going to see less just purely geographic moves but more of a notion of looking to be at a place that is intellectually and socially free.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spain,\u00a0like many European countries<\/a>, has moved quickly to capture this shift. The government\u2019s EduBridge to Spain initiative, launched in September, offers students at all academic levels a streamlined route to transfer from U.S. institutions to Spanish ones. It is a scheme aimed at those\u00a0affected by U.S. visa restrictions<\/a>.<\/p>\n Esade\u00a0has about 15,700 students in total, with international students making up between 60 and 70\u00a0percent.<\/p>\n Tra\u00e7a says Madrid is a particular focus for growth. \u201cWe need to build up in Madrid, which is becoming a European megahub,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But not all markets are growing. Tra\u00e7a pointed to a decline in Chinese students at the school. \u201cThere used to be this big flow of students from China, but we are no longer getting those numbers. China has extraordinary institutions of its own now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Indian students, meanwhile, are increasingly returning home after graduating, drawn by expanding opportunities on the subcontinent.<\/p>\n But Tra\u00e7a stressed that the Iberian Peninsula is emerging as a new hub for students and professionals seeking stability, adding that instability in Eastern Europe, driven by security concerns, is adding further momentum.<\/p>\n Beyond student recruitment, Tra\u00e7a, who has been at the helm for nearly two years, said the school is focused on rethinking business education. \u201cWe are rethinking everything,\u201d he said, in response to the pressures of artificial intelligence, geopolitical upheaval and what he sees as a long-overdue reassessment of the purpose of business education.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re trying to reassess this idea that business schools are just marketing, finance and so on,\u201d he said. \u201cIn terms of skills we need to provide three layers. One is the business and law side, the core of what we\u2019re doing, and then touching on the tech side and on the geopolitical and social side, to understand where we\u2019re going and how we can fix it. And also focusing on humanities.\u201d<\/p>\n The school recently launched a bachelor\u2019s degree in business and AI and a degree in global governance.<\/p>\n \u201cBusiness schools are really at a fundamental transformation point. We need to change a lot of the presumptions we\u2019ve had about where we\u2019re going, what our role is and what our relevance is,\u201d he said. \u201cI believe a future where business schools do not coalesce around this goal [of contributing to the betterment of society] will be a very challenging one for them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tra\u00e7a said students and academics are forgoing the \u201cmessy, uncertain and\u00a0\u2026 toxic\u201d U.S. for Madrid and Barcelona. Latin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[20096,859,300,20095,8769,273,17],"class_list":["post-44280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-career","tag-education","tag-events","tag-higher","tag-jobs","tag-news","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}