If there’s one thing on which a majority of Americans can agree, it is that there aren’t enough jobs to go around these days. But if Americans don’t become better educated, they risk finding that the opposite will be true and that when the nation has fully recovered from the Great Recession, there won’t be enough qualified people to fill the number of available job opportunities.

According to a report titled “Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements Through 2018,” that the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce released Tuesday, by 2018 there will be 46.8 million job openings, 63 percent of which will require some form of post-secondary education. Currently, approximately 59 percent of jobs require some postsecondary education. The center predicts that the nation will need 22 million new college degrees but will fall short by at least 3 million. In addition, there will be a demand for at least 4.7 million new workers with postsecondary certificates. Based on the center’s calculations, American colleges and universities will need to increase the number of degrees they confer each year by ten percent, which translates to about 300,000 college graduates annually.

Dr. Anthony Carnevale, who heads the center, attributes the increasing demand for a better-educated work force to the increased use of technology, particularly computers, which are used across all industries.

“The tasks that are not repetitive are where the value is in every job now and the skills required to perform non-repetitive tasks—solve problems, interact with others in an increasingly service-based economy, and so on — tend to require some kind of postsecondary education,” Carnevale said. There has been a rise in the demand for postsecondary education since the 1981 recession and it will continue to do so “in a fairly aggressive way,” he added, and the effect of globalization will accelerate it even more.