Academic offer of advanced digital technologies

The European Commission’s priority “A Europe fit for the digital age” aims at benefiting from digitalisation in a safe and ethical way. The EU has set a range of policies aimed at improving the digital skills of the society, both at basic and advanced level, backed by several investment instruments. This dataset is the result of a project to support policy making by providing insights on the availability and composition of education offer in four key digital domains: artificial intelligence, high performance computing, cybersecurity, and data science. Given the strategic importance of acquiring such competences for future economic productivity, we investigate the availability of education offer in these advanced digital technologies, to keep track of its evolution and identify possible gaps of digital competence in these key areas. Following a text mining methodology that captures the inclusion of advanced digital technologies in the programmes’ syllabus, we monitor the availability of masters’ programmes, bachelor’s programmes and short professional courses and study their characteristics. These include the scope or depth with which the digital content is taught (classified into broad or specialised), education fields in which digital technologies are embedded (e.g., Information and communication technologies, Business, administration and law), and the content areas covered by the programmes (e.g. robotics, machine learning). Also, we consider the overlap between the four domains, to identify complementarities and synergies in the academic offer of advanced digital technologies. The dataset covers yearly data, starting from the academic year 2019-2020. In order to provide comparison with other competing economies, the dataset covers the EU and its Member States plus six additional countries: the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, the United States, and Australia. Results of the study have been used as reference in the European Artificial Intelligence Strategy, the White Paper on Artificial Intelligence – a European approach to excellence and trust, in the Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2019 and 2021. These data have substantiated the assessment of the national Recovery and Resilience plans, and are used as input for the Digital Resilience Dashboard, among others.