Abstract:

The Public Management and Administration (PMA) degree at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) has almost closed the first four-year cycle in the current academic year 2015-2016. The PMA degree curriculum has four years or 240 European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) credits (60 cr/y) assigned to the degree, and one year or 60 ECTS credits assigned to the master. The PMA degree has not exact equivalents in the rest of Europe (The Bologna Agreement zone), but is a necessary professional education for future public administration professionals and other involved in the relationships between private companies and the public administration at all levels (city, region (comunidad autónoma, department, lander, etc.), nation and supranational organizations).

When this degree was proposed and designed, taking in account that UJI had an active pre-Bologna three years degree (1992-2010), with relatively low number of registrations in the last five years, one of the main objectives was to incorporate 70 new students every academic year. However, since 2012, the first year, the number of registrations never reached this threshold and, worse, never had a waiting list as the case of Medicine, Clinical Psychology, Translation and Interpretation, etc., the most demanded studies at the UJI. More badly, every year, among the new admitted students, more than 15% leaves the studies even at the end of the academic year.

This current year 2015-2016, institutional efforts for disseminating the PMA degree information among the high and middle school students were almost quadruplicated, taking advantage that the UJI has reached 25 years of life (1991-2016). Recently, the pre-registration results were publicized for the teaching staff. In the PMA case, only 49 new students intend to develop these studies at the UJI, just only five more than the last year. What is going on?.

In ICERI2015 (Coltell et al., 2015:4493-4497), we revised the new challenge for the PMA degree for moving to the new 3+2 Bologna curriculum design. And in INTED2016 (Coltell et al., 2016:6054-6061), we described a possible design of a pilot design of a degree-based integrative project for applying the Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach. The movement to the 3+2 structure was blocked by regional governments with the agreement of the corresponding public universities. And the situation remains the same until we don’t know what year. The PBL project is still a proposal not developed in a project design. In the meanwhile, the degree is constantly leaking students or losing new ones.

The aim of this work is to describe the historical situation of the PMA degree about numbers of new registrations, relinquishments, and success. And, on the other part, identify and describe visible and hidden factors which prevent to boost the trend of PMA degree population.

Keywords:

Public Management and Administration Degree, Student registrations and relinquishments, Graduates success.