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Graduating on to the dole in South Australia

By Malcolm King - posted Wednesday, 30 November 2016


While our universities speak of liberalism and the spirit of enquiry, they are using the uncapped, demand-driven enrolment system to churn students through their packed faculties, leaving thousands to graduate on to the dole with high HECS debts.

Law graduates are working as baristas, engineering graduates are flogging laptops at Harvey Norman while marketing majors kneel before customers in shoe shops.

This is a national issue but in South Australia, the 'Big Three' publicly funded universities: Flinders University, the University of Adelaide and UniSA, are drifting further from the realities of the job market.

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The demand-driven system comes from the Gillard Government declaration in 2010 that by 2025, 40 per cent of 25-34 year olds would have a bachelor degree. Yet it's this age cohort that is being hit hardest by unemployment and under employment.

According to Commonwealth Department of Education and Training (DET) figures, there were 11,895 domestic bachelor degree graduates from the 'Big Three' universities last year. If we include postgraduate awardees, the figure rises to a whopping 19,680 graduates.

The 2015 Graduate Destination Survey (GDS) provides the estimated number of bachelor degree graduates who have found a fulltime job four months after graduating.

But there's a problem. Individual universities administer the survey and graduates are invited to respond. While about 50 per cent of former students do so, those who haven't got a fulltime job or who are flipping burgers in 'Macca's', give it a miss. It's meaningless to report that 60 or 70 per cent of graduates found a fulltime contract job working in short term contracts.

The figures show sunshine when it's raining on a significant percentage of the graduate population. They need to sample the whole cohort.

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According to recent research by the National Institute of Labour Studies at Flinders University, between 2008-2014, the proportion of new university graduates in full time employment dropped from 89 per cent to 67 per cent.

Flinders University Adjunct Professor Tom Karmel said on the ABC recently that students would struggle to find work.

"That's not to say they won't get a job, but people have to start thinking about the return that they get on their degrees," he said. "There's been no doubt that universities have been very keen to expand their enrolments. There's a clear financial incentive to do so but I think they're going to be under more and more scrutiny in terms of the outcomes for the graduates."

Is this the promise of the future for our young people? Like a Raymond Carver short story, full of jaded expectations, broken promises and regret?

Some years ago I was a programs director and senior lecturer at a large university in Melbourne. I was responsible for about 1500 students, 50 staff and nine programs split over the TAFE and higher education sectors. I taught journalism and poetry (an odd double, I know) and organisational systems in another faculty. The programs I led earned the university about $1M per year after wages.

The university always wanted more money. So half of my time was spent writing new degrees and full fee short courses and launching them. I never wavered from the principle that the graduates had to be armed with the latest capabilities and skills to help themget a job. Then the university introduced a new raft of KPI's, none of which focused on employability. I left 12 months later.

The bachelor degree has now replaced Year 12 as the basic requirement for employment. So what's the weight and value of the old matriculation year worth? Producing tens of thousands of graduates devalues the qualification as well as the university that supplies them. Will we need 'super degrees'?

Nationally, between 2009-2014, bachelor degree enrolments grew by 26 per cent and enrolments in master's degrees skyrocketed by 41 per cent – in part to escape the dole queues.

It's hard to sustain the myth that there is an ever-increasing need for graduates that is going unmet, especially in communications, law and engineering.

All is far from well with science graduates too. A recent Grattan report examined theresults of the Commonwealth Government's push to increase enrolments in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses.

The report's author, Andrew Norton, found that, "science bachelor degree graduates generally have worse employment outcomes than graduates in most other disciplines: fewer find full time jobs when they graduate, fewer have full time jobs three years after graduation, and fewer use what they learnt in their job."

It's odd that we live in the digital age yet the industrial revolution ethos of 'more and more', still rules. In Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times, he likened the steam driven pistons of the machine age to an elephant's head, moving up and down in a mad and melancholy motion. For many South Australian graduates of the 'Big Three' universities, hard times comes from watching the job rejection letters mount.

The problem isn't a lack of highly qualified graduates. The problem is a lack of jobs.Our large universities must take the state's high unemployment rate in to account and start capping undergraduate courses.

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About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

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