Abstract:

University-Industry Collaboration (UIC) might bring several benefits for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and their graduates as, for example, curricula aligned with the market needs, innovative pedagogical opportunities, internships and job opportunities. Particularly, the participation of HEIs in Research and Innovation (R&I) projects in collaboration with the industry might facilitate the school-to-work transition of their graduates, which will be reflected in courses with higher employment rates.

With the aim of investigating this relationship, a dataset was built by matching three sources and it includes all the undergraduate courses provided by Portuguese HEIs in 2019, 2020 and 2021 (around 3,000 observations) and 1,274 R&I projects in UIC. A multivariate model, where the employment rate of recent graduated per course is explained by the number of R&I projects in which the respective HEI participated in collaboration with businesses, was applied. Considering both demand and supply factors related with employment, several control variables were also included: courses’ characteristics (average of final Grade Point Average, GPA, and eight dummies denoting the fields of study); HEI characteristics (dimension; private/public and polytechnic/university nature); regional variables (turnover per capita, physical capital flow and R&D expenses in turnover) and time dummies identifying the years 2020 and 2021. In a second model, the number of R&I projects was replaced by an interaction term between this variable and each study-field dummy.

The results suggest that, the higher the number of collaborations of HEI with the industry in developing joint innovation projects, the higher the employment rate of their courses. This is particularly important for courses in the Services field, but also for Information technologies and Natural sciences; Arts and Humanities; Social sciences, Management and Law and Engineering and Construction courses, especially if these courses are lectured in public HEIs. The negative coefficients of the 2020- and 2021-years’ dummies (with a higher incidence in the year 2020) shows that the COVID-19 pandemic and their containment measures impacted graduates’ employment very hardly in 2020, but with some recovery in 2021. Nevertheless, the higher impact of COVID-19 was felt in sectors with a strong international dependence, which might explain that all the fields of study seems to have higher employment rates than Services (where tourism and hospitality courses are included). Thus, the positive influence of R&I projects for Services’ courses is even more important considering that it might help to countervail the COVID-19 impact in this field. Education and Engineering and construction stand out as being the fields of study with higher employment rates. Students’ final GPA also positively contributes to higher employment, suggesting that, besides degree completion, the grades obtained during the course also represent an advantage in the labour market, which should be considered in the design of the HE policies. Our findings could be of special interest for HEIs and policymakers, highlighting the importance of endorsing a stronger collaboration between HEIs and firms, through multiple channels, including joint R&I projects.

Keywords:

R&I networks, Unemployment, School-to-work transition, Field of study, COVID-19.