How ICT Human Capital Shapes Sustainable Employment Outcomes in European Higher Education: EU-27 Panel Evidence (2013–2023)

The persistent shortage of ICT specialists across the European Union has intensified the strategic relevance of digital human capital as a determinant of labour market resilience and structural competitiveness. This study provides a systematic assessment of how ICT human capital—proxied by ICT tertiary enrolments, graduate output, and specialist employment—shapes the employment prospects of recent tertiary graduates in the EU-27 between 2013 and 2023. Drawing on harmonised Eurostat panel data and fixed-effects estimations with robust corrections for cross-sectional dependence, the analysis disentangles both direct effects and context-specific moderations associated with economic development, urbanisation patterns, and renewable energy penetration. Results demonstrate that ICT enrolments exert a consistently positive influence on graduate employability, whereas the labour market impact of ICT graduates and specialists is heterogeneous, reflecting differentiated absorptive capacities and sectoral saturation dynamics across Member States. Interaction effects further reveal that the urban concentration attenuates marginal returns to ICT education, while the integration of digital and green transitions remains institutionally underdeveloped. Collectively, the findings position digital tertiary education as a core pillar of sustainable employment formation yet highlight the necessity of coordinated policy architectures that align higher education pathways with regional labour market structures and the evolving green-digital policy agenda in Europe.