In both enlightening and depressing news, some v. interesting data has dropped that reveals which undergraduates have found it the hardest to get full-time jobs post-higher study, as well as which courses had the highest level of dissatisfaction.
I don’t know about you but I’m getting major flashbacks to my undergraduate degree when I told people I was studying fine arts and marketing and they said: “Oh … are there jobs in that?” and I had to be like, “1800-DID-I-ASK, brother?” but then as soon as I got home I started crying.
Anyway. Enough about me. Onto the raw, hard data, which comes by way of a survey from the Federal Department of Education-funded Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching.
Responses were received from just over 131,000 graduates who attended an Australian higher education institution between March 2021 and February 2022. Response times varied, but folks were typically surveyed within four months of graduating. Their thoughts and feelings were compiled in a report, which was released this month.
The data showed that 77 per cent of folks who had recently completed their undergraduate degrees were chuffed with what they’d chosen to study. This may sound like a solid number, but it was actually the worst result in more than a decade; in both 2016 and 2020 the figure was just over 80 per cent.
According to the report, the biggest influencing factor was what people studied, which checks out. However, I will hazard a guess that another contributing factor was that bitch known as “the pandemic”, which resulted in a switch to online learning and personnel shakeups.
The undergraduate study areas with the most disappointed folks were dentistry (55 per cent), creative arts (72 per cent) and engineering (72 per cent). Having a poke around a stranger’s stanky mouth and building bridges are both my idea of personal hell, so I understand this.
Folks who completed undergraduate degrees in agriculture and environmental studies (88 per cent), social work (83 per cent) and humanities, culture and social sciences (83 per cent) were the most hunky dory. Yay for farming, helping people and learning about the Bolshevik revolution!
Finally, in totally unsurprising news, undergraduates from higher socioeconomic backgrounds had a better chance of copping a full-time job at 80 per cent, compared to 77 per cent of folks from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
And that’s it! In short: more people are unhappy with what they studied; folks who graduated with degrees in creative arts, communications and tourism, hospitality and sports struggled the most to find full-time work, and women are being paid less than men. Also, people living with a disability and those whose main language at home wasn’t English had far lower rates of full-time employment, while graduates from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to cop a full-time job.
In terms of employment outcomes, 88 per cent of undergraduates said they’d found a job, while 79 per cent said they’d copped full-time employment. The report said it followed the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ concepts and definitions re: employment, so being employed means folks work at least one hour a week. Graduates who work 35 hours per week or more, or usually work that many hours in all their current jobs combined, are considered to be employed full-time.
I low-key love how working at least one hour a week is considered being “employed”. Do you technically have a job? Yes. Can you afford literally anything in this bastard country? No. But at least you have an undergraduate degree!
According to the study, 81 per cent of folks who studied creative arts were employed, but only 57 per cent had full-time jobs.
And while 87 per cent of law, social work, arts and humanities, psychology and communications grads had jobs, full-time employment rates spanned from 68 per cent (comms) to 80 per cent (law).
Overall, tourism, hospitality and sports graduates had the lowest rate of full-time employment at 65 per cent, but 89 per cent had a job.
On the other end of the spectrum, 97 per cent of pharmacy undergrads were employed, and 96 per cent had full-time gigs. Both the employment and full-time employment rate of rehabilitation graduates (for example, physiotherapy) was 97 per cent.
Folks who studied veterinary studies, medicine, teaching, engineering, nursing, business, health services and agriculture and environmental studies all had employment rates in the nineties, with 90 per cent of vets and 93 per cent of doctors working full-time. Except for health services which had a full-time employment rate of 79 per cent, the other study areas had full-time employment rates in the eighties.
What I want to know is whether folks found employment in the field they’d studied, or if they were forced to get a job doing something else because, you know, cost of living and all that.
Speaking of moolah, according to the report, the average full-time salary for undergraduate students is $68,000. Do with that information what you please.
And we can’t talk about money without having a gander at that ol’ chestnut, the gender pay gap. Data showed a discrepancy still remains, but it’s gotten *slightly* better over the years. In 2009, women undergraduates earned $47,000 — a whole $3,000 less than blokes with the same qualifications. In 2022, however, the gender pay gap in average undergraduate salaries had decreased to $2,000, which is still fucking bullshit as far as I’m concerned TBH.
The survey results also unearthed some other unfair shiz. People living with a disability had a full-time employment rate of 69 per cent — a whole 11 per cent lower than undergraduates who didn’t report a disability. In a similar vein, folks whose main language at home wasn’t English had a much lower rate of full-time employment at 66 per cent. For undergraduates whose home language was English, the full-time employment rate was 79 per cent. Discrimination is still alive and well, people!
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