Educational Shifts in the Age of Automation: Does increasing robotization influence Norwegian students’ educational choices?

Abstract

Over the past few decades, rapid advancement in robotic technology has significantly transformed global industries, labour markets, and many other facets of society. Robotization has disrupted traditional tasks and occupations, replacing various manual tasks with effective robotic technologies. As a result, there is a shift in the demand for different skills in the labour market. The aim of this thesis is to add to the previous literature on the effects of robotization by exploring how Norwegian students´ choice of educational program in upper secondary school change when they are faced with the evolving and increasing levels of robotization.

In this thesis, this was investigated through an empirical analysis using a two-way fixed effects model regressing a predicted robot exposure measure for each local labour market, on the enrolment shares of the two main educational paths in Norway. The estimations are based on educational data provided by the National Education Database (NUBD), on the municipality level, and data on the Norwegian import of industrial robots by industry, provided by the International Federation of Robotics. The main analysis revealed a statistically significant increase in the enrolment share of vocational studies, while there was no significant effect for general studies. When including a lead and lags analysis of the robot exposure variable, the increase in vocational study enrolment increased even further, and the enrolment share of general studies decreased. There was however evidence that the assumption behind the model is broken, meaning the results are unreliable. This thesis emphasizes the complicated and nuanced effects of robotization on educational choices.

All the handling and analysing of data in this thesis have been conducted using the statistical software program Stata/SE 18.0.