European agrifood and forestry education for a sustainable future - Gap analysis from an informatics approach

Abstract

Background The NextFood Project (www.nextfood-project.eu) started work in 2018 to identify ‘Categories of Skills’ that students should be equipped with to address the upcoming global challenges within agrifood and forestry disciplines, and involved concepts such as sustainability, technological adaptation and networking. However, the NextFood initiatives only reached out to a limited part of the education system in Europe and were potentially biased in their targeted approaches, since they involved focus group interviews and surveys directed at key participants, the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’. We therefore carried out a complementary study using a non-targeted informatic approach to see how well a selection of European agrifood and forestry Masters program websites are aligned with the NextFood Project ‘Categories of Skills.’ Methods Python-based web-scraping scripts were used to collect texts from a selection of European Masters program websites, which were then analysed using statistical tools. A total of 14 countries, 27 universities, 1303 European Masters programs, 3305 web-pages and almost two million words were studied using this approach. Results While agrifood and forestry Masters programs were aligned with the NextFood Project ‘Categories of Skills’ equal to or more often than unrelated Masters programs, we found evidence for the relative underuse of words associated with networking skills, with least use among agriculture-related Masters programs. Conclusions The informatics approach provides evidence that many European agrifood and forestry Masters programs are following the educational paths for meeting future challenges as outlined by the NextFood Project, with the possible exception of networking skills. This approach allows a complementary and time-efficient overview of the current state of education in the agrifood system in Europe.