Half of Portugal's Undergraduates Miss Their Own Graduation Date, and the Foreign Student Body Has Quadrupled to Eighty Thousand in Fifteen Years

Just over half of the students who enrol on a Portuguese undergraduate degree finish it in the time the degree is supposed to take. Three years past the official duration, a third of them still have not finished at all. Those two figures come from an analysis the Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos (Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation) released on Monday, timed for the start of the academic year, and reported by ECO.

The precise number is 51 percent, and it barely moves between sectors: 50 percent of students in public higher education complete a licenciatura within the expected duration, against 53 percent in the private sector. Add a year of grace and the rates rise to 60 percent public and 61 percent private. Add three years and both converge on 66 percent.

Integrated masters, the long single-cycle degrees that cover medicine, most engineering and architecture, do somewhat better: 55 percent finish on time, 66 percent within a year of the deadline, and 73 percent within three.

The Averages Hide Almost Everything

What makes the analysis worth reading rather than merely quoting is that it breaks the completion rate down by institution within the same course, and the spread is extraordinary. Among integrated masters in medicine, the share of students finishing within the prescribed six years runs from 77 percent at the weakest institution to 88 percent at the strongest. In architecture, the same measure runs from 2 percent to 42 percent.

A range of two to 42 is not a difference in student quality. It is a difference in how a course is structured, how a final project or dissertation is scheduled, and how strictly an institution counts a student as having finished. Anyone choosing between architecture schools on the strength of a national average is choosing on a number that describes almost nobody.

Dropout tells a related story. Counting only students who leave higher education altogether, rather than those who switch course or institution, the share who had gone within a year of entering reached 30 percent of the intake in both 2022/2023 and 2023/2024. The foundation notes the expected pattern, that dropout runs higher on courses with lower entry marks. But it also notes the exception that undercuts the easy reading: even on courses where the average entry mark hovers around 18 out of 20, 9.4 percent of entrants are gone by the end of the first year.

Eighty Thousand Foreign Students, Up From Twenty Thousand

The figure with the most direct bearing on foreign residents is the one about foreign students, and it is the largest movement in the whole analysis. Over the past fifteen years the number of international students in Portuguese higher education has quadrupled, from 20,000 to 80,000 in the 2024/2025 academic year, growing at a steady average of about 4,000 additional students a year.

In integrated masters the multiple is not four but seven: 3,282 foreign students in 2010 against 22,523 in 2025. The five countries sending the most students are Brazil, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, France and Italy, a list that maps almost exactly onto Portugal's Lusophone ties and its two largest continental European diasporas.

Set that against total enrolment and the proportion becomes clear. More than 456,000 students were registered in Portuguese higher education in 2024/2025, up 2 percent on the previous year, 15 percent on five years earlier and 30 percent on a decade earlier. Eighty thousand of 456,000 means roughly one student in six now comes from abroad. The growth came mainly from bachelor's degrees and standalone masters; integrated masters shrank, reflecting a contraction in how many are offered.

This is the arithmetic behind a set of stories that have been running separately all year. It is why the Universidade de Coimbra expects more than 2,300 mobility students from 120 countries this term with more than 3,000 Brazilians already enrolled, and why Lisbon's law faculty opened a dedicated AIMA channel in August to fast-track residence permits for foreign students and staff. A student body that adds 4,000 non-nationals a year is a residence-permit caseload before it is anything else.

Where the Marks Are Highest, and What Everyone Studies

Two further findings round out the picture. The first concerns STEM, meaning science, technology, engineering and mathematics. New entrants into those fields rose 57 percent over ten years, from 17,304 to 27,193, lifting the STEM share of all new entrants by 2.3 percentage points to 28.5 percent in 2024/2025. New STEM graduates rose too, though less steeply, at 30 percent above 2014/2015. Portugal is putting more people into those courses considerably faster than it is getting them out the other end.

The second is the entry-mark table for the national admissions round, and the University of Porto takes the top two places. Aerospace Engineering at the Faculdade de Engenharia (Faculty of Engineering) required an average of 19.5 out of 20, Industrial Engineering and Management at the same faculty 19.0, and Medicine at the Faculdade de Medicina (Faculty of Medicine) 18.8.

Beyond higher education, the same analysis counts more than two million students enrolled across the whole Portuguese system in 2024/2025, from pre-school through to university.

What This Means for Expats

• Budget for longer than the prospectus says. If half of undergraduates take more than three years to finish a three-year degree, the realistic planning assumption for tuition, accommodation and, for non-EU families, the residence permit renewals attached to student status is four years rather than three. The one-year overrun is the common case, not the exception.
• Ask the institution for its own completion rate. The national average of 51 percent is close to useless at the point of choosing. Institutions hold course-level completion data and the spread between them, particularly in architecture and the design fields, is wide enough to be the deciding factor.
• Entry marks do not predict survival. A 9.4 percent first-year dropout on courses averaging 18 out of 20 is a warning that difficulty, workload and course fit matter as much as prior attainment. High marks buy a place; they do not buy a finish.
• You are not an outlier any more. One student in six is foreign. That is a large enough share that institutional support, international offices and the AIMA channels now being opened on campuses are built for a real population rather than a handful of exceptions. It is worth asking what the international office actually does before enrolling.
• STEM places are expanding faster than STEM graduates. A 57 percent rise in entrants against a 30 percent rise in graduates means the bottleneck has moved from getting in to getting through. For anyone weighing a Portuguese engineering degree against one at home, that gap is the thing to interrogate.

The foundation frames the exercise as a portrait rather than a diagnosis, and it does not attempt to say why architecture at one school finishes two percent of its cohort on time and another finishes 42. That question belongs to the institutions and, eventually, to the regulator. What the analysis does establish is that Portugal's higher education system has grown by 30 percent in a decade, that a sixth of it is now foreign, and that its completion rates have not obviously kept pace with either.