Marcos Santos / USP
Visible drop of almost 11 percentage points in the number of students completing secondary education. Six factors in the decline of candidates for higher education.
The number of students who concluded o secondary education em 2024/2025 decreased 10.7 percentage points compared to the previous year, which may explain the decrease in the number of candidates placed in the 1st phase in the higher education competition.
According to the study “Break of Tickets in Access to Higher Education in 2025/26. Diagnosis, Evidence and Analysis”, carried out by the office of the Secretary of State for Higher Education, to which the newspaper had access, in 2025 there was a decrease of six thousand placed in the 1st phase in the national competition for access to higher education.
“If, in 2023/24, 90,1% of students on scientific-humanistic courses had completed secondary school, this percentage dropped to 79,4% last year”, according to the study that analyzes the drop in admissions to higher education 2025/26.
According to the study, the changes “are reflected, almost directly, in the potential universe of candidates and, consequently, in the number of placements, given the average age at entry into higher education is close to the age at which secondary education is completed”.
“It’s a decrease close to 10% in total new subscribers (minus 8,000 in relation to 2024) in the system as a whole, which includes the national competition and other access regimes, and which shows that the drop “was not compensated by subsequent phases or other access routes”, is mentioned in the study.
The values were below of the levels pre-pandemic, interrupting a growth trajectory, which could, according to the study, “call into question the country’s goal of having 50% of adults between the ages of 25 and 34 with a higher education diploma by 2030″.
Six factors
The study points out that in addition to the decrease in the number of secondary education graduates, the “interannual volatility of student classifications exams national and the increase in the minimum number of entrance exams contributed to restricting the universe of eligible candidates.”
The break can also be explained by “weaknesses in the current system of social action that limit access”, a progressive reduction of young population and “high dependence of the Portuguese system of immediate post-secondary admissions”.
Changes in the high school completion model and the minimum requirement of two entrance exams have been identified as the main responsible for the break.
All this is one “warning sign” in higher education, as Público describes.
“Based on data from the national access competition between 2015 and 2025, this requirement was responsible for around 46% of the drop in the 1st phase of 2025/26, “without demonstrated gains in academic success”, according to the report.
Still with regard to completing secondary education, between 2019/20 and 2023/24, rates improved due to the exceptional rules of the pandemic in which students only had to take the national exams they needed to enter higher education (they were not mandatory for completing scientific-humanistic courses).
The study states that the evolution was “parallel to an increase in the number of candidates, which was around 50 thousand in the 1st phase of the national competition”.
According to the document, “it is still not possible to conclude that the decrease in the secondary school completion rate was due exclusively to the change in the minimum number of national exams”.
“Also because the completion rate in professional courses has also decreased and these students do not take national exams to complete this level of education”, according to the report.
