Estonia cannot move toward a more knowledge‑intensive economy faster than the number of people with the necessary expertise grows. That is why expanding higher education, retaining our talented people and attracting international talent is simultaneously education policy and economic policy. The number of study places must grow together with the number of young people who want to study. If we miss this opportunity now, it cannot be compensated later by more research funding, innovation grants for companies or recruiting a few foreign top specialists.

Estonia has set the goal of reaching 110 percent of the EU average in labor productivity by 2035; in 2025, the figure was only 77 percent. This gap cannot be closed simply by working more within the same business models. More Estonian companies must move from subcontracting to creating their own products, technologies and intellectual property. That requires researchers, engineers, development managers and other highly skilled people. Higher productivity, in turn, determines the state's ability to fund national defense, education and public services from tax revenue.

A larger cohort of high school graduates is already waiting at the doors of Estonia's universities, higher education institutions and vocational schools. The government's decision to plan additional funding for new study places is therefore a necessary step — an investment in Estonia's future economic growth.

To ensure that the share of young people who continue their studies does not decline, admissions must grow at the same pace as the number of upper‑secondary graduates. Otherwise, we send our most capable graduates a silent message: go study in Helsinki, Stockholm or Amsterdam. And they will — many will find professional and personal reasons to stay there after graduation. It will then be too late to wonder why they do not return out of patriotic duty alone.

The Rectors' Council proposes setting a goal that at least 55 percent of Estonia's 25–34‑year‑olds have higher education (in 2025 the figure was 44.3 percent). Yet a full third of people in this age group currently have no professional education at all, and around 20,700 people — 13 percent — have only basic education or less. That is roughly the number of children born in Estonia over more than two years.

According to the Estonian Human Development Report, each additional year of education increases average wages by about six percent. Looking beyond individual benefits, we must ask critically whether we have enough people to develop new technologies, design complex processes and manage them. The volume of higher education sets a ceiling not only for the economy but also for the state's ability to maintain functioning health care and education systems and ensure expertise in the public sector.

In OECD comparisons, Estonia's lag is especially large in doctoral‑level knowledge. Only 0.8 percent of Estonians aged 25–64 hold a doctorate, compared with the OECD average of 1.2 percent. The government's agreement to increase doctoral admissions to 500 people per year within five years is commendable and would raise the figure to an estimated 1.1 percent by 2035 — but even then Estonia would remain behind others.

To reach at least 1.5 percent, admissions would need to grow to around 1,000 doctoral candidates per year over a longer period. These people are needed not only by universities but also by pharmaceutical, AI, energy, defense and deep‑tech companies, as well as the public sector, which must be able to make expert decisions in these complex fields.

Increasing doctoral education requires significantly more students to enter bachelor's studies first, and then choose to pursue master's and doctoral degrees. Growing the number of people with doctorates therefore requires strengthening the entire higher‑education pathway.

Innovation requires not only money but also people

Here we see a link that has received too little attention: the connection between higher education and funding for research and development. According to the Rectors' Council, Estonia should invest four percent of GDP in R&D by 2030 — 1.2 percent from the state and 2.8 percent from companies. The corporate share is larger, but even if the necessary money exists, it will not automatically make the economy knowledge‑intensive. Companies need people who can lead the development of new solutions.

Of course, technology can be purchased from elsewhere, but then the knowledge created, the intellectual property and most of the profit also remain elsewhere. Even to understand, adapt and apply technology developed abroad, local top specialists are needed. That is why higher‑education funding deserves as much attention as incentives for corporate R&D investment. People with master's and doctoral degrees can turn research funding into new products and technologies — but their pipeline begins already in bachelor's studies.

The Estonian Employers Confederation rightly highlights the shortage of specialists with engineering and technical skills. The Ministry of Education and Research has agreed with universities that admissions must grow in high‑demand fields as larger cohorts reach university age — not only in engineering and IT but also in medicine and teacher training.

However, the solution is not simply reallocating study places. Closing 100 study places in the humanities or social sciences will not automatically produce 100 new engineering students. Moreover, new technology does not emerge or take root solely through engineering knowledge. Its adoption requires increasingly deep understanding of basic sciences as well as law, management, human behavior and change communication. Therefore, priority fields must be expanded through additional capacity, not at the expense of other essential competencies.

A similar exclusionary rhetoric must also be resolved in the relationship between higher education and vocational education.

It is incorrect to treat the expansion of higher education as a choice made at the expense of vocational education. A high‑tech company needs technicians, operators, electricians, lab assistants and other vocationally skilled workers alongside researchers and engineers. Studies show that the growth of high‑tech jobs creates additional jobs in the same region for specialists with specific vocational skills.

Thus, knowledge‑intensive entrepreneurship also creates new opportunities for vocational skills. A researcher's idea does not reach production without people who know how to build it reliably and keep it running.

Growing the necessary pipeline of top specialists from Estonia's own young people is unavoidable, but preparing a master's or doctoral graduate takes years. Therefore, we must maintain professional ties with Estonians who have gone abroad to study or conduct research, and we must also bring in knowledge from elsewhere. Talent policy is not a more polite name for migration policy, nor a campaign where a few top specialists are greeted at the airport.

According to calculations by the Rectors' Council based on Eurostat data, nearly 450 people from Estonia have earned a doctoral degree at European universities over the past ten years. It would be naïve to expect all of them to return to Estonia. However, the state could set a goal of connecting at least 30 of them each year with Estonian universities, companies or the public sector.

This does not require each person to move to Estonia. A connection can be created through a joint research project, supervising students or advising a company. Naturally, some of them could come to Estonia to establish knowledge‑intensive companies or boost the growth of existing ones — something that specifically requires doctoral‑level expertise.

Academic freedom as a competitive advantage

The race for talent is underway across the developed world, and other countries are not waiting for good people to knock on their door. France, for example, launched the "Choose France for Science" program. Norway created a measure worth 300 million Norwegian kroner (around €30 million) for 2025–2028, hoping to recruit 30–40 international researchers. The European Union launched a €500 million initiative, "Choose Europe for Science." These steps were prompted by restrictions on academic freedom and research funding in the United States and by the desire to make attractive offers to researchers seeking new places to work.

It is a separate question whether and how Estonia should use the difficulties of an academic community under political pressure to strengthen its own position. But these initiatives send a clear message: an open and stable research environment — and the freedom to study politically uncomfortable questions — has become a strategic advantage. Estonia cannot yet compete with major powers in terms of salaries, but as one of the world leaders in academic freedom, we can offer researchers freedom to operate and shape their field flexibly.

Foreign researchers recruited to Estonia in this way can fill important knowledge gaps, gather new research groups around themselves and launch new research directions — but they cannot replace our own educated pipeline. A more knowledge‑intensive economy can only be built as fast as we can prepare the people needed for it. Ten years from now, Estonia would be missing precisely those highly educated people who would like to study here today but may not get a study place simply because of their birth year.

If the long‑awaited larger generation of young people is treated as a surplus in the education system, the number of people who reach higher education will remain a ceiling for Estonia's economy — a ceiling that cannot later be lifted by research and innovation funding or by recruiting foreign researchers. Therefore, every political party promising economic growth must show in its election program how the number of highly educated people needed to achieve that goal will increase.

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