The importance of bilingual education is widely debated in the scientific world; it represents an opportunity for millions of international students in the 21st century, endorsed with varied benefits, including cognitive, neurolinguistic, socio-cultural, academic or labor, among others. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of bilingual education on students who graduated from bilingual programs by measuring three key factors (employability, mobility and intercultural awareness), and comparing the results with those from a group of students who graduated from non-bilingual programs. A factorial analysis was carried out to reduce the size of the original set of variables from 11 to 3, thus constituting a model of scientific efficiency. Finally, this paper shows a statistical evaluation of the real effects that bilingual programs have achieved since implementation, concluding that the three main factors identified here allow the scientific evaluation of the success of bilingual programs.

Bilingual programs have become more common in higher education around the world in an attempt to provide learners with the education they need to face today’s world. These programs can provide academic, linguistic, intercultural, and professional benefits to students. Consequently, countries like Spain have developed bilingual education to help students become proficient in foreign languages and develop essential competences for their professional futures. Research has analysed how Spanish bilingual education is implemented, and how teachers are trained. However, few studies examine how bilingual programs impact graduates’ employability, mobility, and intercultural awareness, and how graduates perceive their skill development. Moreover, little has been studied about bilingual graduates’ work situation and whether participating in these programs has helped them find work abroad. This paper analyses whether a combination of participation in Spanish bilingual programs, employment, and experiences working abroad affects bilingual education graduates’ self-perceived employability, mobility, and intercultural awareness. This study adopts a quantitative approach, in which 741 respondents participated. Findings show that bilingual graduates who are currently working have higher self-perceived employability and better perceptions of their mobility and employability competences than those who followed monolingual studies, even when they have not worked abroad.