Secondary-School Completion Rate Slides 10.7 Points as Portuguese Graduates Fall Back to Pre-Pandemic Numbers
Portugal's secondary-school completion rate fell 10.7 percentage points year on year, returning graduate numbers to pre-pandemic levels and fuelling a sharp drop in 2025 university placements. The government is now pivoting toward adult learners.
The number of Portuguese students who finished secondary school at the end of the 2024/25 academic year fell by 10.7 percentage points compared to the previous year, wiping out the gains of the pandemic period and returning the cohort to the same volume last seen before Covid-19 disrupted classrooms in 2020. The drop is the sharpest annual reversal in more than a decade and has knock-on effects now showing up in university admissions.
What the Numbers Show
Data reviewed this week by Público’s higher-education desk indicates that the sudden contraction in graduates is one of the main reasons the national higher-education entrance competition (Concurso Nacional de Acesso) for the 2025 academic year placed fewer candidates than the year before. A smaller pool of 12th-graders finishing on time inevitably produces a smaller pool of university applicants, and the drop is compounded by weaker performance on the national examinations, which further shrank placements in the first phase of the competition.
Government officials and academic observers had been expecting some correction after the pandemic bump — the years when in-person assessments were softened and completion rates spiked to historic highs — but the scale of the fall has unsettled the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation. On the face of it the 2024/25 cohort is back to 2018/19 levels, roughly where Portugal stood before the emergency measures that made graduation easier for two consecutive years.
Why This Year Is Different
Three forces appear to be converging. First, the 2024/25 cohort is the first to have sat a “normalised” set of national exams after the steady re-tightening of assessment standards. Second, demographic decline continues to shrink the size of each new cohort entering 10th grade, an effect that now compounds every year of secondary enrolment data. Third, retention has edged back up in 11th and 12th grades as teachers returned to pre-pandemic grading norms — a factor the Federação Nacional de Professores has flagged as pushing more students into technical-professional pathways or out of formal education entirely.
The University Response
Faced with fewer 18-year-old applicants, the government is now publicly signalling a strategic pivot toward adult learners. New rules for higher-education access in 2026 ease the mature-student route and expand the M23 examination (for candidates over 23 without a traditional secondary diploma), while the Ministry has floated expanded apprenticeship-linked pathways under the Programa Impulso Adultos. Public universities, particularly in the interior, have lobbied for a broadening of short-cycle technical (TeSP) courses that can absorb students who would otherwise drop out between upper-secondary and tertiary education.
What to Watch Next
The first phase of the 2026 national competition opens in July, and the Direção-Geral do Ensino Superior has already indicated it expects another constrained year. Institutions depending on first-phase placements — particularly lower-prestige universities and polytechnics outside Lisbon and Porto — are building recruitment plans around the adult-learner route rather than waiting for the traditional 18-year-old pipeline to recover.
For families with children approaching the end of secondary school, the policy message is that 12th-grade performance now matters more than it has in several years, and that any post-secondary gap — a work year, a language course abroad, a professional certification — should be planned rather than assumed. For the higher-education system, it is the clearest signal yet that demographic headwinds are no longer theoretical.
