Education plays a decisive role for young Spaniards when it comes to accessing the work market, since academic training has become an essential condition for this access. This is one of the conclusions of the research project "Family and Social Change. Study of social change in Spain", presented by Neus Caparrós Civera, professor at the University of Navarra, during a conference organized by the Institute of Family Sciences of this academic center.

The aim of the project, which has not yet been completed and which is based on the 1991 Sociodemographic survey , is to analyze the different social changes that have taken place in Spain from 1900 to 1991 and which have had the family as a protagonist. Specifically, Neus Caparrós referred to the status of the level of programs of study of the children in relation to the programs of study of the father, taking as one of the variables the eight generations into which the study is divided.

"The children surpass the level of programs of study of the parents," he commented. "The older the generation, the higher the proportion of the population without programs of study, i.e., the younger the population, the more academic (institutionalized) programs of study they have. With the universalization of Education, more people have had access to programs of study and, consequently, the level is higher in the younger generations".

Continuous training trend

The professor from the University of Navarra pointed out that "social, cultural and technological transformations have led to personal trajectories being oriented towards continuous training . This trend is revealed in the extension of formal training at all levels. Education has experienced a constant expansion as a result of the broad social consensus, especially in the case of public teaching ".

According to the researcher of the Institute of Sciences for the Family, "the growth of the schooled population has developed gradually at all educational levels up to the university level. Each generation has better training than the one that precedes it. Education has experienced a progressive growth that can be seen from generation to generation and does not seem to have reached its peak".

Another of the conclusions presented by Neus Caparrós is that "the compulsory nature of Education represents a growth in the proportion of people with the capacity to access secondary programs of study , and, therefore, the growth of these in turn generates a higher percentage of people who are in a position to access university programs of study ".

He also acknowledged that "the population without programs of study or only with primary programs of study , which is decreasing, is evidence of the increase in education of the Spanish population". In this sense, he affirmed that "literacy has been an important process for the generations born before 1950, since the vast majority of those born after that date already enjoyed school literacy".