Tonga National University’s second graduation ceremony marked an impressive milestone: nearly 600 young adults receiving qualifications across teaching, nursing, engineering, tourism, business, maritime studies, and the trades. Their families filled the Tonga High School Indoor Stadium with pride, and rightly so. These graduates represent years of effort, discipline, and aspiration. They have done everything asked of them.

But once the gowns are packed away, a far more difficult question comes into view: what has government done to ensure these newly qualified young people can actually build their futures here at home?

Tonga faces an uncomfortable truth. We celebrate our graduates each year, yet we have not built an economy capable of absorbing them. Nurses leave for better pay overseas. Teachers join seasonal labour schemes. Skilled tradespeople migrate for short-term contracts because the domestic market cannot offer stable employment. This is not a failure of the graduates; it is a failure of national planning.

Establishing a national university was a positive development. It has expanded access to training and reduced the cost of gaining qualifications. But education alone cannot fix the workforce crisis. A university can produce certificates and degrees—only a functioning economy can produce careers. Without job opportunities, we are effectively training workers for someone else’s country.

This gap in thinking was laid bare during this year’s election campaign. Not one candidate presented a coherent agenda for job creation. There were promises about transparency, governance, and reform, but the central question facing Tonga’s future—how to generate employment for our young people—went almost entirely unaddressed. It is impossible to talk about retaining nurses, teachers, and technicians when no plan exists to strengthen the industries that would employ them.