Higher education has experienced rapid expansion in the last decades in Asia and other areas. In the expansion movement, realizing what is changed and what is unchanged in higher education has become an emerging topic in the higher education research community. This study focuses on students’ participation issues in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) programs in the expansion process. We selected Taiwan’s higher education as an example to explore the heterogeneity and gender diversity in STEAM. Based on data collected from students’ STEAM participation during 1982-2022, this study employed a time series approach to detect the heterogeneity issue with the Blau index and gender diversity with Backer’s discrimination coefficient (D). The three stages of higher education development with Trow’s notion were used to interpret the system expansion on the heterogeneity of STEAM participation. Moreover, ensuring equal access to affordable higher education for women and men has become a crucial target of UNESCO’s SDG4-Education 2030. This study focuses on gender diversity as it has been determined that by 2030. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was employed to transform the gender diversity pattern to predict its future trend. This study demonstrates the following results: a. The trend of heterogeneity information in STEAM programs from 1982 to 2022. b. The trend of gender diversity information in STEAM programs from 1982 to 2022. c. Interpretation of heterogeneity and gender diversity in STEAM with Trow’s concept of a three-stage development. d. The future progress of heterogeneity and gender diversity in the STEAM will lead to 2030. The findings suggest that the higher education system experienced high heterogeneity of STEAM programs in this target system. It implies that the participation patterns in STEAM did not respond to the changing external environment sensitively. While gender diversity has shown a significant change in STEAM programs, it might become friendly for female students in the expanded process to 2030. This study provides an example to detect the issue of program heterogeneity and gender diversity. The selected indices for interpreting program participation and gender diversity have been found fitted to explore the topic and could be extended to similar higher education settings.
