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.
