NEWS
campusreview.com.au
Grad expectations
Survey reveals which students and universities
fare best in the graduate job market.
U
ndergraduates who study at Charles Sturt University are
more likely to be employed full-time three years after
graduation than those from other universities – and they’re
probably earning more too.
That’s according to the 2018 Graduate Outcomes Survey –
Longitudinal (GOS-L), which measured the medium-term outcomes
of 2014’s graduates across 60 institutions, including 39 universities.
With 93.2 per cent of undergraduates in full-time employment
after three years, CSU’s biggest competitor against the metric was
Murdoch University, only just trailing CSU’s 93.6 per cent.
More than 92 per cent of undergraduates worked full-time
after leaving the University of Technology Sydney and Australian
National University, and just under that (91.8 per cent) at the
University of South Australia.
These outcomes converge over time, but salary levels begin
to disperse. Undergraduate salaries for those coming out of
CSU sit at a median of $78,300 after three years. ANU and UTS
also saw graduates earning $75,000, but those from UNSW Sydney
(with $77,500) and Central Queensland University ($77,200)
earned more.
Overall, the data adds credence to a key takeaway from previous
graduate outcomes reports – that graduates are finding it harder to
establish careers since the global financial crisis.
In 2015, just over two-thirds of graduates were in full-time
employment, but three years on, this rose to 89.2 per cent.
All universities had full-time employment rates above 81 per cent.
Not only do graduates become more successful in finding
employment over this period, they also achieve substantial growth
in salary levels, the report said.
“In 2015, among graduates in full-time employment four months
after their course, the median salary level was $56,700. Three
years later in 2018, the median salary level of the same cohort of
graduates in full-time employment had risen by 23 per cent to
$70,000,” it read.
COURSES COUNT
The report also looked at how the study areas of graduates
affected their likelihood to be working full-time.
In 2015, 95.5 per cent of those who studied pharmacy and
93.3 per cent of those who studied medicine were in full-time
employment, compared to just under half (48 per cent) of those
from tourism, hospitality, personal services, sport and recreation
courses, and 48.3 per cent from both creative arts and science and
mathematics.
By 2018, this disparity was less obvious – 80.4 per cent of those
who had completed courses in creative arts worked full-time while
overall employment for study areas with higher short-term rates
also rose.
“This continues to demonstrate an important point that while
graduates from some fields of education, in particular those with
generalist degrees, have weaker employment outcomes soon after
completing their course, the gap in employment outcomes across
fields of education tends to narrow over time,” the report said.
“Between 2015 and 2018, median salaries improved for graduates
employed full-time from every study area.”
Overall, salaries grew across study areas – by a median
23 per cent – but, at 15 per cent, teacher education graduates
experienced the slowest growth in salaries.
Pharmacy graduates posted the largest increase of 78 per cent
($32,800) but from a relatively low base of $42,300. ■
T
Top scholars weighed up
Australian universities rise in world research rankings.
he University of Sydney has again been named Australia’s
top performing university in a research-only ranking.
It jumped from 26 last year to 23 in the 2018–19
University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP), just behind
Peking University.
The University of Melbourne narrowed the gap between gold
and silver out of our nation’s institutions, moving from 30 in the
2017–18 ranking to take USYD’s old spot.
Harvard University, along with the universities of Toronto and
Oxford, maintained their podium positions.
The University of Queensland, Monash University and UNSW
Sydney also rose in the ranking, while sixth-placing University of
Western Australia slid down one spot to 107.
Curtin University was happy to learn it had leapt into the top
250 universities in the 2018–19 table, rising to 249 in the ranking
from 272 last year.
URAP, a non-profit organisation from the Informatics Institute of
Middle East Technical University, bases the ranking on performance
indicators that reflect the quantity and impact of scholarly
publications, and takes into account international collaboration. ■
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