In recent years, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research has commissioned two studies conducted by the IHS on MINT at universities and on the labour market (Binder et al. 2017, 2021). Based on this work, the project pursues two goals: Firstly, the monitoring of central indicators will be continued and expanded. This monitoring helps to recognise whether and in which areas the multitude of measures to increase the number of first-year students and reduce dropout rates in MINT studies are yielding results. It examines whether the problems in the various MINT subjects have decreased, whether they continue to exist unchanged or whether they have even increased. Indicators for the higher education sector as well as for the labour market entry of graduates will be presented. Secondly, new approaches are taken to analyse possible barriers to increasing the number of MINT graduates. Thus, a focus is placed on the transition from upper secondary school to higher education and on study information at this neuralgic point. In addition, multivariate analyses are used to try and find out which institutional framework conditions at public universities lead to an increase in the intention to drop out or transfer among students in the MINT focus area.
This study uses a variety of data sources (register data from higher education statistics, special evaluation of ATRACK data from Statistik Austria, the Maturierendenbefragung 2022 and the Studierenden-Sozialerhebung 2019 of the IHS) and methods to examine the phenomenon of MINT at universities and on the labour market from a variety of different angles and to find starting points on how the goals pursued in the FTI strategy, among others, can be achieved.