Access to the Degree in Sociology at the Universitat de València: exploring practical reasons

Abstract

The main objective of this contribution is to find out what are the motivations for accessing to the Bachelor's Degree in Sociology at the University of Valencia. To this end, a comparative analysis is carried out between the data from the University of Valencia and the average of the public on-site universities on the percentage of places taken up and the percentage of first-choice enrolments out of the total number of places taken up, which information is obtained from data from the Ministry of Universities. A questionnaire was also carried out among Sociology graduates, as well as two discussion groups with first and fourth year undergraduate students. In both cases, the aim was to find out, among other questions, the reasons why they decided to take a degree in Sociology, as well as the ways of accessing it. The main results obtained point to a certain parallelism in the percentages of occupation and first choices in enrolments for the Universitat de València and the Spanish universities as a whole. On the other hand, it is observed that the majority of people who access the Degree in Sociology do so through the university entrance exams and the motivations vary from those who indicate that they access the degree because they are interested in social and political issues, to those who do so because they have not been able to access the degrees they wanted.