Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemics has forced any context to handle a global crisis and rapidly adapt to unexpected challenges. Universities are not an exception. The COVID-19 pandemic has indeed disrupted the normal education worldwide, forcing to shut down the typical activities of any campus for an extended period. Universities were therefore forced to adapt alternative approaches to continue student’s academic year, which basically implies shifting abruptly from physical (face-to-face) learning to e-learning. The impact of this closure has not affected all university faculty equally. Engineering education, specifically, is typically characterised by lab-based hands-on activity as well as group or team-based learning experiences; this suggests that moving from learning to e-learning had a remarkable impact on students of this area.

In line with this consideration, this paper aims at investigating the performance and university experience of engineering students in Italy, to highlight how and to what extent they were affected by the COVID-19 pandemics. The data relating to the students’ carriers for three subsequent years (2019, 2020 and 2021) were taken from the Italian database Almalaurea (https://www.almalaurea.it/), an inter-university consortium founded in 1994 that includes 78 universities and maps around 90% of the total number of graduates leaving the Italian university system each year. Overall, the number of graduates (at bachelor and master level) in Engineering disciplines, useful to this study, includes more than 30,000 items. A set of aspects are analysed, in line with the Almalaurea survey, such as: the profile of the graduates; their social origin; the previous (baccalaureate) titles; the performance achieved at University level; the conditions of study; the (possible) working conditions during the studies; the University experience; the language skills; the perspectives for future studies or work. The trend of these aspects is delineated across the three years, with the aim to highlight the changes involved by the COVID-19 pandemics.

Keywords:

Engineering, education, University, COVID-19, Italy.