To what extent is higher education achievement conditioned by the secondary education model?

During the 1990s, Spain experienced a phenomenon that is slightly unusual in educational systems: the coexistence of two secondary education models and one single tertiary education model. The overall purpose of this article has been to study the possible differences in the academic performance of students in university education in terms of the model followed in secondary education. We carried out a comparative monitoring of various cohorts of students in the Universities of Barcelona, Oviedo, the Basque Country, Salamanca and Zaragoza (Spain). These institutions are located in regions of differing size and nature, and are representative of the Spanish university system as a whole. In all, we analysed the academic performance of nearly 150,000 university students. The main conclusion we reached is that there are no differences in student academic performance at university in terms of the secondary education system followed.