One in five graduates feel overqualified for their job, three years after completing their degree, in a comprehensive longitudinal study conducted as part of the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) program.
The weirdly-named GOS-L survey (short for Graduate Outcomes Survey-Longitudinal) provides insights into the fortunes and perspectives of graduates three years after they finish their degree and the QILT team released the 2025 results yesterday.
More than 48,000 grads from 127 institutions completed a survey in 2022 when they finished their course, no doubt delighted to be putting the COVID years behind them, only to find that around 20% were feeling underwhelmed by the value of their degree three years later.
The dissatisfied grads said they felt overqualified, and had not been able to fully use their skills and education three years after completing their course.
Despite some areas of dissatisfaction, the outcomes appear pretty outstanding after three years, particularly given the very large cohort involved in the survey. For example, Tourism, hospitality, personal services, sport and rec grads were second lowest with job success just after graduation, with just 63% in a full time gig, but three years later, 90.3% of those grads had landed a full time role. Similarly 60.8% of creative grads were living the dream in a full time job in 2022 but 83.6% had found full time employment by 2025.
Employment outcomes were, unsurprisingly, stronger for grads of vocational degrees , with more than 90% of those who had completed rehab, pharmacy and teaching degrees still working in their field three years later.
In 2022, just after graduation, 79.5% of domestic undergraduates had full-time work, compared to 60.5% of international undergrads, but after three years, this gap had narrowed, with 91.7% of domestic and 84.7% of international grads in full-time roles.
The median salary for domestic graduates after three years was $91,000, compared to $80,500 for international graduates.
The full-time employment rate filtered by university makes for some strange bedfellows statistically, with the University of Melbourne fifth from the bottom, just ahead of Federation and Victoria U. Clearly other factors including demographic, employment rates in region and in Melbourne U’s case, the large number of students stumping up for further study as part of the Melbourne Model need to be taken into consideration before any league tables are compiled.
Comment:
Universities have superlative research capabilities, but massive blindspots when it comes to understanding their own communities – in particular what drives both staff and students.
This is one reason why there is so much interest in our HE People & Performance Conference. A little-known fact is that while there are well over 140,000 people employed in the university sector alone, there is a tiny number of people who are researching what they do; if it’s any good; who is doing it and what could make them do it better. So while some individual institutions run budgets of more than $3 billion, they actually don’t have good comparative data on how to make the most of their most valuable – and most expensive resource – staff. There is an urgent need to grow and share insights.
Similarly, this QILT data is a harbinger of an equally important data story where we are currently seriously failing: the current and future job prospects for grads. “Too hard, too speculative, not relevant because we are hallowed halls of knowledge, we are not here to train people for the workforce”, you say. To which I say, um, sorry, that horse bolted last century – and the Federal Government’s preoccupation with student sentiment and outcomes, as well as the explosion in voting power of younger Australians has made this issue as urgent as understanding how to treat staff.
The value proposition for Australian universities is swinging in the breeze- as any good pollster interested in university social licence will apparently tell you. However that breeze is fast becoming a typhoon, fanned by anxiety over AI taking jobs, international instability, possible economic contraction; oh and a bloke called Mustafa Suleyman, the AI chief of Microsoft, who is again getting a bunch of headlines globally for saying that AI will take over key tasks in white-collar jobs within 18 months. Which is being reported as ‘replacing white collar jobs’ in social media posts across the planet as we speak. All based on a line in a single interview conducted in February.
It doesn’t matter whether you are in a sandstone enclave or cement block ghetto – every graduate, every potential student every current student deserves some sort of fact-based rebuttal of Mr Suleyman’s prediction if the value proposition of post-school education is going to be maintained.
Not the usual platitudes. Not the PowerBI chart that no-one can be bothered downloading. There is a pressing need for a clarion call of hope and also of reason. If we believe that the prediction of major reductions in grad openings due to AI are true in some fields, we need to adjust intakes now and provide additional training options for graduates who are accruing debt each year on the assumption that they are likely to be heading out to a job afterwards. If we believe they are not true, we need to explain why. With research. With the same sort of rigor that our academic staff would attack any other problem.
Bastions of research can no longer hold themselves as too important to investigate and respond to serious public challenges about the future of tertiary education. We have been so busy trying to navigate a publicly-acceptable approach to assessment and AI, that we run the risk of being wholly overtaken by a public argument about whether any assessment is worth doing in the first place.