The Federal Government has released graduate outcomes, student experience and employer satisfaction surveys for 2024 all at once last week.
Sages versed in the ways of Government media management know that holding onto bad news and dumping it amidst an avalanche of other better news helps to neutralise the focus on the negative.
As a result, when Education Minister Jason Clare trumpeted graduate outcomes, the drop in employment was couched carefully, in a literal soft sell. “While there was a softening between 2023 and 2024 in line with the broader labour market, full-time employment remains higher than pre-pandemic,” Minister Clare said in his press release.
This ran below the good news on employer satisfaction, which had risen 1.8% to 85.5%, the highest rate since the survey began in 2016.
Student satisfaction also grew and now exceed pre-pandemic levels.
Monash University’s Professor Andrew Norton observes that graduate outcomes were released in the same year as it was collected in 2021, noting, “The government’s inability/refusal to release data in a timely way means that we need alternative sources of information for sector-relevant trends.”
If a grad has to grab a retail gig after graduation, because they can’t find a job relevant to their degree, should that be a positive employment outcome for the university?
In a valuable analysis of the efficacy of current attempts to measure graduate outcomes Professor Norton noted that US studies had suggested AI had reduced graduate employment opportunities and examined a range of data sources to get a deeper understanding of employment outcomes.
“The GOS, ABS qualification and occupation data for people aged 24 and under, and job advertisement data are all consistent with a decline in graduate outcomes between 2023 and 2024,” Professor Norton writes.
“The ABS data suggests that 2025 GOS results might be slightly better than those in 2024, but the graduate-specific job advertisement data points in the other direction.”