POLICY & REFORM campusreview. com. au
Delayed gratification
Immediate employment prospects don’ t look so good for new graduates, but the numbers show they still come out ahead in the long run.
By Antonia Maiolo
The short-term job outlook for recent university graduates looks bleak. A record number of students are graduating into unemployment, the latest research by Graduate Careers Australia shows.
GCA released its latest data on graduate employment in three reports made available in July. The first report states that in 2014, 68.1 per cent of new bachelor degree graduates had found a full-time position within four months of finishing their courses. This was down from 71.3 per cent in 2013.
Bruce Guthrie, policy adviser at GCA, says the labour market for new graduates is still suffering from the downturn in late 2008 following the global financial crisis.
He says a series of structural and policy changes locally and internationally – local occurrences like the end of the mining boom and international issues such as Greece and China’ s economic problems – has caused local recruiters to adopt a more conservative attitude to hiring new graduates.
“ What we have seen is they are pulling out of the marketplace and not hiring graduates in the numbers they had in previous years,” Guthrie says.“ The prospects for new graduates four months out of university have fallen again slightly.”
In addition, results showed that in 2014, 20.3 per cent of new graduates were working part-time or casual whilst looking for full-time employment – the highest this figure has been since 1990. But the survey also pointed to data that shows a university degree still offers a greater chance of securing employment in the long-term.
In fact, figures show graduates’ longer-term prospects have strengthened. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for May 2014 show that in the general labour force( aged 15 – 74) just 3.2 per cent of bachelor degree graduates were unemployed( 3.4 per cent in 2013). The May 2014 unemployment rate for those without post-school qualifications was 8.2 per cent. Additionally, the latest Department of
Employment projections show that job prospects for skilled workers – those with a bachelor degree or higher qualification – remain favourable. He also noted that the Public Service Commission is set to lift its freeze on hiring.
Employment of graduates is forecast to grow by 13.1 per cent over the five years to November 2019, in comparison with expected growth in overall employment of 10.0 per cent.
“ Our research shows that unemployment is not a long-term concern for graduates and it’ s important to understand that getting a degree is not just about the first job after university: it’ s about a lifetime of advantage in the labour market, as well as the potential for huge personal growth,” Guthrie says.“ The first job after university is just the starting point, the first rung on the ladder for them. It’ s often not the job they wanted or imagined themselves being in, but it’ s their starting point.”
The second report in the series of three focused on recent graduate earnings.
Results showed little change in the median starting salary for bachelor degree students aged less than 25 and in their first full-time job – $ 52,500 in 2014, compared with $ 52,450 in 2013. Males started full-time work on a median salary of $ 55,000, whilst females’ starting wage was up slightly from 2013, to $ 52,000 in 2014. Guthrie attempted to explain that gap.“ Females generally show lower starting salaries than males,” Guthrie says.“ When you’ ve got a lot of men in highly paid engineering [ roles ] and a lot of females in middle paid education and nursing, that tends to drag the female median down.
“ We did an analysis of starting salaries last year in which we factored out a lot of those things that can have an effect. We tried to get down to males and females in the same sort of work from the same fields, and we found that there was still a difference of about 4 per cent in their starting salaries.
“ It might mean there are some other variables we didn’ t have access to that might have explained some of that 4 per cent. That doesn’ t mean there isn’ t – in the wider labour market and workforce – disparity in male / female salaries. For graduates [ though ], we find the difference is not as big as it might look when you look at other starting salaries.”
The third report, looking at graduates’ experience with higher education, shows high levels of course satisfaction, with 93.8 per cent of those surveyed expressing broad satisfaction with their experience. ■
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