Informatics Education in Europe: Institutions, Degrees, Students, Positions, Salaries — Key Data 2008-2012

From the beginnings of Informatics Europe (the association of university departments and industrial research labs in computer science in Europe) it was clear that one of the principal tasks would be to collect the facts. The report is one of the first results of this effort. The principal author is Cristina Pereira, who collected and organized the relevant data over more than a year; I helped with the preparation of the final text. Gathering the information is particularly difficult for Europe given the national variations and the absence of centralized statistical data. Even the list of names under which institutions teach informatics in Europe fills a large table in the report. Cristina's decision was, from the start, to favor quality over quantity: to focus on impeccable data for countries for which we could get it, rather than trying to cover the whole continent with data of variable credibility. The result is the first systematic repository of basic information on informatics education in Europe: institutions, degrees offered and numbers awarded, student numbers, position titles and definitions, and salaries for PhD students, postdocs and professors of various ranks.