What 'studying in English' in Spain actually means

In November, a boy called Freddie came to see me.

He was already in Valencia.

Already enrolled.

Already three months into a business degree the website had described as taught in English.

He had come home for a long weekend and he looked grey.

Two of his core modules that semester were being taught in Spanish.

Not partly. Not with slides in English.

In Spanish.

The lecturer, the exams, the group work, the textbook. All of it.

Freddie's Spanish was ordering-a-coffee Spanish.

And this is the part nobody had explained to him before he moved country.

"Studying in English" in Spain is not a legal term.

It's a marketing phrase.

It means whatever the university decides it means.

Some programmes are fully in English. Every module, every exam, every professor, from first year to graduation.

Others are what the sector quietly calls bilingual.

Bilingual can mean a lot of things.

It can mean half the modules are in Spanish.

It can mean the first two years are in English and the last two switch.

It can mean the timetable is in English but the seminars aren't.

It can mean a professor who was hired to teach in English but is far more comfortable in Spanish, and drifts back into it by week three.

None of that is fraud.

The university isn't lying.

It's that the phrase on the webpage and the reality in the lecture hall are two different things, and the gap between them is where students like Freddie fall.

So why does this catch so many out?

Because the word "English" does a lot of quiet work on a homepage.

A British family reads "taught in English" and reads certainty.

They picture Freddie sitting exams in the language he's spoken his whole life.

What they don't picture is a Spanish civil law module in second year that was never going to be in English, because it was never taught in English to anyone.

I want to be fair to the universities here.

Many of them are upfront if you dig into the module breakdown.

The information is often there.

But it's buried, it's in Spanish half the time, and it assumes you know to look for it.

Most families don't.

They trust the headline.

The range of outcomes is what worries me.

At one end, a student thrives in a genuinely English programme and barely notices the language of the country around him.

At the other, a student sits an exam in a language he can't yet function in, fails it, and has to repeat the year.

I've seen both.

Same phrase on the website. Different reality behind it.

Freddie stayed, for what it's worth.

He hired a tutor, clawed his way through, and passed those two modules in June by the skin of his teeth.

He was one of the lucky ones.

Because the thing about "studying in English" in Spain is that it's a promise made by a marketing department.

Not a guarantee made by a timetable.

And the two don't always agree.