Universities will cop a reputational whammy from a Senate committee inquiry that no one seems to have seen coming.
Last week, Senators referred to committee, “the rise in the number of Australian university graduates who struggle to find work after graduating.”
The Education and Employment References Committee has until November to report on specifics, including:
- The entry-level job market
- Whether graduates’ were taught employment skills
- Economic, social and psychological effects of job hunting, plus the whammiest of whammies,
- “The quality of university education in Australia”
The brief is from Senator Payman (Australia’s Voice), the former Labor backbencher who went independent in July ‘24.
“The young people who go to university did what they were told to do: 'Go to uni, study hard, and you'll be rewarded for that hard work.' The promise that was made to them was not kept. For those young people who somehow managed to get a job and fend off AI, what they learned at uni will often be hopelessly misaligned with the work they're actually doing,” she said.
If university lobbies have any friends in the upper house, they failed to see this coming.
Senator Payman moved the inquiry a fortnight back, pitching hard the horrors of job hunting. “This seemingly endless cycle of torment impacts your self-worth. It dehumanises you. It makes you wonder why on earth you spent years studying and saddled yourself with tens of thousands of dollars of debt,” she told the Senate.
Inquiry submissions along these lines will be dreadful for university lobbies, hearings truly terrible and social media ineffably awful.
And anybody who thinks Senate committees are generally ignored should remember the hit HE took from the 2023 inquiry on sexual consent laws.
“University students who have experienced sexual violence are being significantly re-traumatised and, in some instances, are unable to continue their higher education, as a consequence of their treatment by their university. The committee cannot over-emphasise how troubled it is by these outcomes, nor over-state how disappointed it is in the university sector’s overall response,” the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs reported.
People who think Hansard is a race horse heard that message and the same will happen with evidence to and findings in this inquiry.
The best the lobbies can hope for is the committee reporting date (November 20) blows out; by a month would suit.