Mondragón (Basque: Arrasate or Mondragoe), officially known as Arrasate/Mondragón, is a town and municipality in Gipuzkoa Province, Basque Country, Spain. Its population in 2015 was 21,933.
The valley of the High Deba where the town is located enjoyed a high level of employment in the 1980s while the rest of the Basque industrial areas suffered from the steel crisis.
Noted poverty expert and sociology professor Barbara J. Peters of Stony Brook Southampton has studied the incorporated and entirely resident-owned town of Mondragón. "In Mondragón, I saw no signs of poverty. I saw no signs of extreme wealth," Peters said. "I saw people looking out for each other…. It's a caring form of capitalism."[2]
Mondragón serves as base of Mondragón University, a private university created in 1997, that is connected with the MCC companies. Almost all of the university's graduates find their first job within three months after completing their studies due to this strong link.
Mondragón University is divided into engineering, humanities, and enterprise faculties. The faculty of engineering is in Mondragon and Goierri. The humanities faculty is in Eskoriatza and the enterprise faculty is in Bidasoa and Oñati. The student enrollment is approximately 3,500 and is rapidly growing. The majority of the students are from Gipuzkoa and surrounding villages, although in the last few years, the number of students from Bilbao, San Sebastián, and the Basque Country capital, Vitoria-Gasteiz, has increased significantly.
