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Students spending tens of thousands of dollars on expensive degrees are increasingly struggling to find full-time work in the year after finishing university.
New data released this week shows a quarter of all university graduates did not secure a job last year, with just 74 per cent in full-time employment. But those who were hired pocketed bigger salaries.
“In 2024, the full-time employment rate for graduates declined across all study levels. The largest drop was among those with undergraduate degrees,” the latest graduate outcomes survey from QILT (Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching) said. QILT is a suite of national, higher education surveys endorsed by the Department of Education and Training that covers the student life cycle.
Just over half of creative arts graduates were not in full-time employment last year, while those with undergraduate science and mathematics degrees were also more likely to be out of full-time work.
The proportion of graduates with humanities degrees, which can cost $50,000 in fees, in full-time employment dropped slightly to 65 per cent.
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Monash Business School’s higher education analyst Dr Andrew Norton said, while the dip in graduate employment across the board last year might be short term, some students may be reconsidering the value of a university degree.
“There are good reasons to be concerned. Even if the data is not showing that AI is taking entry-level jobs yet, it will be a factor in the near future,” he said.
“And some people who thought ‘uni is my best option’, they will say, ‘I will do something else. Why get student debt when I’m not sure if I will get a benefit at the end?’ ”
Return on investment was front of mind when Australian Catholic University student Emma Prendergast deliberated where to study exercise and sports science.
“I genuinely wanted to do my research and see what I was getting out of the four years.”
Australian Catholic University students Maple Mirzaiyun, Thomas Lee and Emma Prendergast. Credit: Steven Siewert
That research led her to the statistic indicating 100 per cent of students of a similar degree at the university – physiotherapy – had landed a job almost immediately after graduating for the past decade.
“That meant that they had a pretty good student success … The students had different experiences, different learning types, but the one thing they had in common was the education here,” she said.
ACU physiotherapy student Thomas Seungmin Lee attributed the high employment rate to a hands-on approach, including working with four or five cadavers laid out on tables right from the beginning of the degree.
“It’s a bit intense at first. There’s the upper body, lower body, the nerves, muscles, bones, everything. So we just get really familiar with where everything is, what all those things do, and how they relate to the body function … It just prepares you better than other unis,” he said.
Maple Mirzaiyun chose Australian Catholic University because she thought its mandatory pro bono legal volunteering course could help give her practical hands-on experience and build a professional network throughout her study of a law and criminology degree.
“It means that, basically, you get experience before [you’re]expected to have the experience, which is really different,” she said.
When it came to salaries, dentists, teachers and some engineering graduates got the biggest pay rises last year, receiving an extra $5000 or more on average when compared to 2023.
Across 30 areas of study, men earned bigger pay cheques than women graduates in their first year in the workforce. There were just eight areas where women earned more than men, including engineering, accounting, and business and finance.
One of the starkest differences was language and literature degree graduates; men earned $15,000 more than women on average last year.
In 2021, the gender difference in median salaries for undergraduates was $3000, but after three years in the workforce that difference had grown to $7000.
Across the board, undergraduates earned a median salary of $75,000 per year in 2024, 5.6 per cent higher than in 2023.
The University of New England had the highest-paid graduates in NSW, followed by Charles Sturt University and UNSW.
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