Introduction
The S7 – AI intensity in university places indicator measures the proportion of available places in university programmes with AI content in total number of places in university programmes by Member State. The S7 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 and S6, 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
From this graph we see that Estonia and Romania are the two Member States with the highest percentage of AI programmes in tertiary education. They have the highest proportion of available places in university programmes with AI content in both bachelor’s and master’s studies. Concerning master’s degree programmes, Slovakia and Denmark also have noticeable percentages of available AI-places, 16.9% and 12.5%, respectively. However, the intensity of AI in bachelor’s degree places in these two countries is relatively low, less than 5% in both cases. All other Member States have an AI intensity in bachelor’s degree and master’s degree places below 10%.
As observed with indicator S5, for bachelor’s degree studies there are no available places in university programmes with AI content in Slovenia, Luxembourg, Croatia and Bulgaria. However, Luxembourg and Croatia at least present modest percentages regarding master’s degree courses. It needs to be remembered that this analysis is based on English-taught programmes, which leaves out a variable proportion of programmes taught in national language.
Finally, for several countries the AI intensity is higher for master’s degree courses than for bachelor’s degree programmes. This gap is more substantial for Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Slovakia, France, Denmark and Sweden.
