FROM THE FIVE YEARS MANAGEMENT STUDIES SPANISH DEGREE TO THE FOUR YEARS BACHELOR’S MANAGEMENT STUDIES DEGREE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS FROM THE FIRMS’ NECESSITIES POINT OF VIEW

The Bologna Process involves a significant change in the philosophy and structure of the European university curricula, as well as an opportunity for these universities to review their syllabus and to improve their errors and lacks. At this paper we start from the idea that, following the analysed studies, the Spanish university employers and graduates detected significant shortages in the Management Studies five years Degree. We suggest that, for the Spanish universities, the development of a new four years curriculum degree in Management has been a challenge that allowed the universities to bring the syllabus of the degree closer to the managerial reality. That is why the goal of this paper is to state whether the transformation of the five years to the fourth year’s degree has also meant a higher rapprochement of the university studies to the social and managerial demand. To that end we will analyse and compare the academic syllabus of both five years and new four years degree in Management Studies of the twelve biggest Spanish universities. The results show no great differences in the actions of those universities. On the whole, the curricula of the four years degree are focused in specific subjects of business economies, decreasing the hours of subjects dedicated to the firm’s context and subjects with an instrumental character. We also observe that the adaptation to the demands of the firms has been only partial.