The right education at the right time. A longitudinal study of the relation between labor market prognoses and educational planning, 1959-2019

The project analyses how the state has managed a central challenge in the knowledge society: to make the citizens’ educational investments in the present to match the needs of the labor market in the future.

Two complex tasks must be coordinated in order to achieve a production of the right education at the right time: (1) to forecast the future labor marked needs and (2) to organize the contemporary education system in accordance with the prognoses.

We analyze both tasks, with a special emphasis on the relation between them, and focusing on the sphere of higher education. To what degree do the competence prognoses and the educational planning correspond?

This has been neglected in previous research.The sixty-year period from 1959, when labor market prognoses were institutionalized, to 2019 is examined. When analyzing the use and precision of prognoses of the future a historical perspective is required.

The annual activities of making prognoses and planning higher education are examined in relation to the drastic changes brought about by political reforms and economic crises.The project provides new perspectives on this central challenge by empirically examining the interplay between continuity and change in these crucial activities.

This adds to the existent literature on educational planning, which primarily have focused on changes expressed through revised political goals, but have not analyzed how the actual supply of education is annually being forecasted and planned.