Demand, supply and graduate output

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Supply growth as a percentage hides the thing that actually matters: the size of the pipeline it is growing from. A tight market in a field producing 411 graduates a year is a different proposition from one producing 43,736 — the first means genuine scarcity, the second means you are one of a crowd even when demand is strong. Bars are to linear scale, which is the point: two disciplines account for over half the total.

Everything else here describes the present. This does not. It is my read of where each discipline’s demand index lands by 2030, given the drivers and risks I can see — and forecasts about labour markets five years out are usually wrong in interesting ways. Each carries a confidence level. Treat the direction as the useful part and the number as decoration.

Projected demand is a forecast. This is the outcome — how recent graduates aged 22–27 actually fared. Underemployment matters more than unemployment here: it counts graduates working in jobs that don't require a degree at all, and engineering's low rates are the strongest evidence that these degrees convert into the work they promise. Against a national graduate average of 5.7% unemployed and 41.5% underemployed, most engineering majors land under 20% underemployed.