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Many European countries nowadays are collaboratively focused on bringing together the most up-to-date technologies and the brightest minds to deal with social, economic, and ecological matters and find a sustainable equipoise. Universities may help to produce appropriate knowledge for such challenges and foster economic and social innovation. This paper reviews evidence of existing bonds between tertiary education and economic growth measured in GDP per capita providing a quantitative evaluation of such dependencies using the now widely criticized Cobb-Douglas production function for building Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) econometric models. The results obtained in this research showed that tertiary education expenditures and the numbers of mainly male BA and MA graduates (in technologies, sciences and medicine robustly and partially correlate with economic growth. Well-distributed investment in the development of tertiary education STEM majors can potentially strengthen universities’ positive impact on sustainable economic growth.