The Report has been received favourably, even being described as a document that deserves bipartisan support.1 Yet despite a favourable reception, it is doubtful if its recommendations can be taken seriously.
The problem for the Accord is not that its predictions are likely to have a large margin of error. Nor is it merely ambitious. It is not even “courageous” in the Yes, Minister sense. The real problem is that it fails to consider critical recent evidence about changing relationships between tertiary education and employment.
Figure 1 summarises the main baseline projection for the Accord, and it almost speaks for itself in showing potential shortages of some 215,000 higher education qualifications each year between 2022 and 2052.
It is easy to scoff at such projections. We know that long-term projections have a large margin of error. On the demand side, there is no policy expert who knows what the job market will look like in 2050. On the supply side, most of the 1.8 million students envisaged for 2050 have not even been born, not to mention that the supply of graduates is heavily influenced by the volatile variables of migration and international students.
