policy & reform campusreview . com . au
Uncertain future
Rural unis shine , gender gap persists in latest QILT survey .
By Wade Zaglas
The latest Quality Indicators for
Learning and Teaching ( QILT )
Graduate Outcomes Survey ( GOS ) report shows an unsurprising decline in employment for higher education graduates over the last 12 months , mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic .
FULL-TIME EMPLOYMENT AND WORKING HOURS
Compared with 219 , when 72.2 per cent of graduates were employed full-time four to six months after study completion , 2020 ’ s percentage of graduates in the same situation has dipped to 69.7 per cent .
The GOS report highlights that this is the lowest full-time employment rate for graduates since 2014 when the effects of the global financial crisis resulted in a full-time employment rate of 68.1 per cent .
And while overall employment rates for graduates ( including part-time and casual employees ) were higher than their full-time counterparts , working hours have dropped across all three areas .
“ The reduction in working hours was particularly pronounced for graduates working on a part-time basis . For these graduates , average hours worked per week fell 22 per cent between May 2019 and May 2020 ( from 18.9 to 14.7 hours ), while for graduates working full-time the reduction was 6 per cent ( from 41.1 to 38.5 hours ),” the report said .
POSTGRADUATE VERSUS UNDERGRADUATE EMPLOYMENT
As in previous recessions , young and less experienced individuals “ fare worse in a downturn ”. For instance , the fulltime employment rate for postgraduate coursework graduates dipped marginally by 1 . 2 per cent between 2019 and 2020 , from 86.8 per cent to 85.6 per cent respectively .
Slightly lower rates of full-time employment among postgraduate research graduates were evident , with 81.1 per cent employed in 2019 and 80.1 per cent in 2020 – a decline of only one per cent .
In contrast , the survey found a markedly higher decline in undergraduate fulltime employment , registering a drop of 3.5 per cent . In terms of overall employment ( full-time , part-time and casual ), “ undergraduates [ fell ] by 1.7 percentage points in comparison with falls of 1.1 percentage points among postgraduate coursework graduates and 0.7 percentage points among postgraduate research graduates ”.
STUDY AREAS Graduates of vocationally oriented study areas are having the most success in 2020 , the GOS report highlights . For instance , the undergraduate full-time employment rate for pharmacy graduates has bucked the trend this year , rising 0.7 per cent from 95.7 per cent in 2019 to 96.4 per cent this year .
While not as high as pharmacy graduates , the full-time employment rate among
10