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campusreview.com.au
Regional unis top
city cousins
Rankings show graduates of institutions away
from Australia’s urban centres have higher
employment rates and starting salaries.
UNIVERSITY
OVERALL
SALARY
OVERALL
EMPLOYMENT
Charles Darwin University
$60,000
$60,000
$60,000
$60,000
$60,000
$59,800
$59,500
$63,000
$56,000
82%
81%
84%
75%
84%
79%
63%
CQUniversity Australia
Charles Sturt University
University of New England
University of Southern Queensland
University of Notre Dame Australia
Edith Cowan University
University of Western Australia
James Cook University
UNSW Australia
$59,000
69%
75%
77%
Top performers in salary and employment rates among graduates. Shading
denotes that a university has a high proportion of mature age, part-time or
distance education students. Universities are awarded five stars if they fall within
the top 20 per cent of all universities in a given category. Table: GEG.
R
ankings measuring student experience, graduate employment
outcomes and starting salaries have placed Australia’s regional
universities on top.
The Good Universities Guide 2017, published by the Good Education
Group (GEG), shows that while country and city universities have
similar levels of student satisfaction, graduates of regional institutions
have higher starting salaries and employment rates in Australia. It
also found that mature-age students, students who enter university
via alternative pathways, part-time attendees, and distance students
have strong employment outcomes. The universities who enrol
higher proportions of these students performed better in The Good
Universities Guide 2017. Only Australian universities were ranked.
GEG crunched the numbers from the federal government
Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) website. The
rankings didn’t consider research outputs and academic reputation,
which are major influences in the QS World University Rankings
and Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
Ross White, GEG’s head of product, said this is because
prospective students care more about teaching quality and
employment outcomes than research.
“What we’ve done this year is focused on some metrics that
are probably more key to our prospective undergraduate student
audience, like measures of teaching quality, measures of graduate
employment, and measures of graduate starting salaries as well,”
White explained. “Those are the things that, we feel, are key to a
school-leaver type audience when selecting a university.” n
Drop-out rates no worry: Craven
ACU chief says universities
are using analytics to better
target support for students.
T
he Australian Catholic University
vice-chancellor has sidestepped
concerns about rising drop-out
rates among first-year undergraduates.
Professor Greg Craven said Australian
universities that grow “responsibly” develop
“more sophisticated” ways of tracking
students’ academic progress.
Federal Education Department data
showed the national average drop-out rate
for first-year students to be 15.18 per cent in
2014, which is the highest since 2005. For
ACU students, the attrition rate was 15.34 per
cent in 2014. The statistics also show drop-out
numbers have been increasing, slightly, since
2005. ACU’s annual reports also show that its
enrolment numbers have risen substantially
since 2009, from 18,507 that year, to 30,248
in 2014.
Craven argued learning analytics
allow his university to responsibly handle
exponential growth.
“Basically, everybody is covered with
invisible red laser dots,” Craven explained.
“They’re categorised by references to vast
numbers of things. [For example], ‘This
person is strong in maths, but weak in
English. This person, we think, comes from
a particularly disadvantaged background
and we should watch them’.
“They do a test and it goes slightly wrong,
ding, the dot goes off,” he continued.
“There are intervention strategies all the way
through. What I’ve observed with Australian
universities is that’s what’s happening.
We’ve not only lifted our productivity in
terms of the number of students we teach,
we have dramatically lifted the productivity
in terms of how we teach them. That’s the
good story we’ve got to get out. But, of
course, the news cycle is programmed to
bad news.” n
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