Introduction
The S5 – AI in university programmes in the EU indicator evaluates the intensity with which AI is considered in official curricula, as a proxy of AI skills acquired by current students (and therefore, future workers). For this purpose S5 considers the proportion of programmes with AI content in the total number of programmes in the 2020–21 academic year. The indicator is calculated for bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes to analyse how Member States are coping with the different stages in the training of AI-skilled students.
The European Union
This graph shows that the presence of AI content in master programmes is higher than for bachelor programmes in most Member States. The exceptions are the four countries with the highest proportion of AI content in their bachelor curricula: Belgium, Estonia, Latvia and Poland. For the remaining countries, not only master’s AI intensity is higher in percentage than bachelor’s AI intensity, but their patterns are remarkably different.
For instance, in Slovenia, where there is no AI content in bachelor’s degree programmes, the AI intensity in the master’s degree curricula is the second highest in the EU (15.3%). Other countries with 0% AI intensity in the bachelor’s degree programmes are Luxembourg, Croatia and Bulgaria, which have an AI intensity in master’s programmes of 4.6%, 8.9% and 2.2%, respectively. France and Italy (and to a smaller extent, Spain too), which are countries with a considerable weight in the AI landscape, also display the same kind of discrepancy, with their master’s degree programmes being more able to include AI content than their bachelor’s degree programmes.
However, one needs to remember that this analysis is based on English-taught programmes, which leaves out a variable proportion of programmes taught in national languages. The last feature to remark upon is the high intensity of AI content shown by Slovakia in the master’s degree programme, with a value of 30.4%, the highest in the EU. This is statistically due to the limited overall academic offer (i.e., number of all master programmes) detected in the country.
