Degrees of participation still around
UNIVERSITY COURSES DEFYING RECESSION
TEACHING and pharmacy degrees are proving to be recession-proof, despite the COVID-19 pandemic making it harder for most university graduates to find fulltime work.
The arts, media, tourism and hospitality sectors have been ravaged by the COVID-19 recession, with barely half of last year’s graduates finding a job within four months of finishing uni.
An exclusive News Corp Australia analysis of the latest official data on graduate employment reveals 68.7 per cent of last year’s university graduates found work within four months – down from 72.2 per cent the year before.
But some jobs are virtually recessionproof, the federal Education Department’s Graduate Outcomes Survey reveals.
Among pharmacy graduates, 96.4 per cent found full-time work soon after graduating – thanks to paid internships that require students to work for a year to become fully qualified. Teaching, too, is a recession-proof career, with 80.6 per cent of last year’s graduates finding full-time work within months of leaving uni.
And 83 per cent of engineering graduates found full-time work this year, down only slightly from 84.8 per cent last year.
Structural engineer Kate Upton secured a job with Jacobs in Brisbane soon after graduating from the University of Queensland last year, and is helping design a new hospital in Caboolture.
“I was interested in architecture but wanted more of the maths and technical side at work, so I studied engineering,” Ms Upton said.
The Education Department survey shows that practical degrees have the brightest job prospects.
Despite the pandemic, medicine and nursing graduates are finding it harder to get full-time work this year, as hospitals focus on COVID-19 cases and non-urgent surgery and treatments are postponed.
Only 86.7 per cent of medicine graduates had full-time work within four months this year – down from 91.1 per cent last year.
More than a quarter of nursing graduates did not find a full-time job immediately, with employment rates falling from 76.3 per cent last year to 72.7 per cent this year.
Only 61.4 per cent of psychology gradates found full-time work straight after uni – down from 63.4 per cent last year.
Engineering, law and business management degrees have been less affected by the COVID-19 recession.
Business and management degrees delivered full-time jobs for 74.3 per cent of graduates this year – down from 76.6 per cent.
Three out of four law and paralegal graduates have found full-time work, with the employment rate dropping from 77.3 per cent to 75.7 per cent this year.
Science, maths and computing – the fields where industry is constantly complaining about skills shortages – have some of the lowest levels of full-time employment.
The federal government will make it cheaper for students to study university degrees in science, computing, teaching, nursing and psychology next year – although arts and law degrees will cost more.