The contemporary university is organized into eight faculties, granting bachelor’s (licenciado), master’s (mestre) and doctorate (doutor) degrees in nearly all major fields. It lends its name to the Coimbra Group of European research universities founded in 1985, of which it was a founding member. Enrolling over 20,000 students, more than 15% of whom are international, it is one of Portugal’s most cosmopolitan universities. Coimbra’s alumni over the centuries include Portugal’s national poet Luís de Camões, the mathematician Pedro Nunes, many statesmen, prime ministers and presidents of Portugal, and Nobel Prize laureate António Egaz Moniz.
School year calendar starts in October and finishes in July. In 2004, it was among the first universities in Portugal limiting the time for degree completion. The degree programmes have a specified minimum and maximum time for completion. The time limit is 6 years from the date of first enrolment for the 4 years degrees, and 8 years from the date of first enrolment for 6 years degrees (i.e. Medicine). After that, students have to pay the entire costs of their courses. Even with the time limit and the increased tuition fees, the university has had a high number of applicants every year. Like other universities in Portugal, and unlike the polytechnical institutes and many private universities, the university does not have special classes for workers or night classes. Overcrowded classrooms have been frequent in some disciplines at the Faculties of Science and Technology, Law, and Economics. In those occasions, students may stand during the classes or even stay outside the classroom. These faculties have the highest abandon rate and the biggest average time for degree completion. New buildings, campus expansion and modernized infrastructures since the late 1990s and the 2000s, have solved almost all these problems.
Admission is strictly merit-based, and the university has several departments which are known for higher-than-average selectiveness. Numerus clausus is applied to select among competing applicants. To programmes such as medicine, pharmacy, biomedical engineering, and architecture, admission is an extraordinarily difficult process, and demand a minimum grade point average from high school plus the entrance exams, that usually ranges from 170 to 200 (out of 200). Acceptance rates may vary significantly from faculty to faculty or from department to department. Foreign applicants usually make up more than 10 percent of the applicant pool, and are considered individually by the merits achieved in their respective state of origin or through bilateral protocols between the governments of Portugal and foreign governments. There are also a number of other extraordinary admission processes for older people (admission for candidates older than 23 years old), sportsmen, degree owners from other institutions, students from other institutions (academic transfer), former students (readmission), etc., which are subject to specific standards and regulations set by each department or faculty.
