Introduction
The S6 – University places indicator with AI content measures the number of available places in university programmes with AI content for each Member State. Therefore it provides a view of the potential labour force trained in formal education with AI skills within the EU. The S6 indicator only considers AI capabilities gained from formal tertiary education. The methodology followed to calculate the indicator (Gómez Losada et al., 2020) combines three types of data: the number of students enrolled by education level and education field; the proportion of applicants accepted and studying, accepted and not studying, and rejected in first-degree tertiary education; and the percentage of AI programmes over all programmes.
The latter is based, as in S5, on programmes fully or partially taught in the English language. This was considered as a potentially limiting factor for the validity of the study, and it was therefore scrutinised in a previous report, together with other characteristics of the data source used (López Cobo et al. (2019) pp. 14–16). The impact of the teaching language was found not to be negligible, but limited and not substantially affecting the validity of the results (López Cobo et al. (2019), Righi et al. (2021, 2022)).
The European Union
This graph shows the number of places in university programmes with AI content in the EU. The country with largest number of places in these programmes, in both bachelor’s and master’s degree curricula, is Germany (179,600 places for bachelor’s degree programmes). Every Member State apart from Poland (which accounts for 107,100 places in bachelor’s degree programmes) has one third (or less) of the number of bachelor’s degree programme places in Germany. Slovenia, Bulgaria, Croatia and Luxembourg have no available places at all in bachelor’s studies with AI content in the curricula. Therefore, in terms of bachelor’s degree programmes, Germany is the Member State training largest number of students with AI skills in the EU. In this sense, it is the Member State that is contributing the highest numbers to ensure the presence of skilled workforce in the future. After Germany, Poland and Romania offer the next highest number of bachelor’s degree places with AI content, followed by France, Netherlands, Italy and Belgium.
Regarding master’s degree programmes with AI content, the countries presenting the largest supply are Germany (with 83,700 available places), France (with 61,400), Italy (with 52,700) and Romania (with 33,600). Thus, among the countries capable to provide the largest number of available places in AI master’s degree programmes, the differences are much more limited than what observed for bachelor’s degree programmes. For the rest of the Member States, the S6 indicator for master’s degree programmes presents values below 26,000.
