Here’s the way to make Australia more productive – send everyone to law school. Sounds strange, I know, but hear me out.

According to the KPMG Econotech report, Economic Modelling of Improved Funding and Reform Arrangements for Universities, university graduates make more money than those with only high school qualifications, so, ipso facto, this means they are more productive.

According to the report’s authors, if the government increases its funding, universities will be able to turn out even more graduates who will make the economy even more productive and Australia will be much richer as a result.

Here is where the lawyers come in. Lawyers are among the most highly paid of all graduates. Following the logic of the Econotech report, this must mean that lawyers are more productive than lower paid graduates in, say, science or literature. It follows that producing more lawyers will make Australia richer than graduating more poets or scientists. If we send everyone to law school, Australia will become the most productive country in the world.

Sceptical? Well, there do appear to be a few flaws in this logic. First, if everyone in Australia were a lawyer, who would pour their champagne, light their cigars and unplug their drains? Second, if Australia were a nation of lawyers, there would no clients. (I guess we could all sue one another but this would probably not constitute what most people think of as productive work.)

The absurdity is obvious – we cannot make our country wealthier by sending everyone to law school because we also need other types of workers and there would not be enough useful work for a nation of lawyers to do.

The futility of making everyone a lawyer also applies to graduates in general. It is simply impossible to create high-productivity jobs for every new university graduate, without limit, forever and ever.

Indeed, the Econotech report itself expects productivity to decrease as more students graduate because “… expanding the university sector is likely to involve easing admission requirements so that the additional places are filled with students whose ability is below the average of existing students”. In other words, less bright graduates make less productive workers.

Even if we could accept that graduates, no matter what their number, would find productive work, the whole idea of equating productivity with wages is rather dubious.

In her book, Does Education Matter? Alison Wolf uses the example of bus drivers.

According to Wolf, “… a bus driver – [is] a job found the world over, and involving highly uniform skills. Yet … a bus driver in Germany is paid thirteen times as much as one in Kenya …” If, somehow, a group of Kenyan bus drivers manage to transfer to bus driving jobs in Germany, their wages would skyrocket.

Does this mean that they would have suddenly become much more productive? Wolf asks. “Did something magical occur as they stepped across the border, endowing them with a whole new set of skills”? Or, as Wolf asks, are wages “a highly imperfect measure of an individual’s ‘productivity’?”

The Econotech report adopts an entirely mechanistic view of the relationship between higher education and the economy. Put more money in the hopper and it will be automatically transformed into economic productivity and greater prosperity.

University education will never be able to live up to such an expectation because economic productivity is not just the result of education. Productivity also requires an entrepreneurial spirit, efficient transport links, capital accumulation, flexible work practices, business-friendly government policies and perhaps a temperate climate.

A fulfilling career is part of a good life, and we who work in universities have an obligation to prepare our students for the world of work.

But higher education is, or should be, about more than a set of technical job skills. University education should give students the opportunity to tackle the eternal dilemmas of human existence. What do we mean by fairness and justice? What are the duties of citizenship? What do we value and what can we live without?

We want our graduates to question what they are told, to seek out proof for propositions and assess the value of different arguments.

If we do our jobs right, graduates will learn to discriminate doggerel from a poem, a jingle from a symphony and a scientific argument from mere superstition. They will learn to give credit where it is due, to appreciate the plight of those less fortunate and, if the higher education system is working properly, they will leave with the ability to tell when a facile theory needs a lot more thought – like the relationship between wages and productivity, for example.

- Steven Schwartz