Return on investment was front of mind when Australian Catholic University student Emma Prendergast deliberated where to study exercise and sports science.
“I genuinely wanted to do my research and see what I was getting out of the four years.”
Australian Catholic University students Maple Mirzaiyun, Thomas Lee and Emma Prendergast. Credit: Steven Siewert
That research led her to the statistic indicating 100 per cent of students of a similar degree at the university – physiotherapy – had landed a job almost immediately after graduating for the past decade.
“That meant that they had a pretty good student success … The students had different experiences, different learning types, but the one thing they had in common was the education here,” she said.
ACU physiotherapy student Thomas Seungmin Lee attributed the high employment rate to a hands-on approach, including working with four or five cadavers laid out on tables right from the beginning of the degree.
“It’s a bit intense at first. There’s the upper body, lower body, the nerves, muscles, bones, everything. So we just get really familiar with where everything is, what all those things do, and how they relate to the body function … It just prepares you better than other unis,” he said.
Maple Mirzaiyun chose Australian Catholic University because she thought its mandatory pro bono legal volunteering course could help give her practical hands-on experience and build a professional network throughout her study of a law and criminology degree.
“It means that, basically, you get experience before [you’re]expected to have the experience, which is really different,” she said.
When it came to salaries, dentists, teachers and some engineering graduates got the biggest pay rises last year, receiving an extra $5000 or more on average when compared to 2023.
Across 30 areas of study, men earned bigger pay cheques than women graduates in their first year in the workforce. There were just eight areas where women earned more than men, including engineering, accounting, and business and finance.
One of the starkest differences was language and literature degree graduates; men earned $15,000 more than women on average last year.
In 2021, the gender difference in median salaries for undergraduates was $3000, but after three years in the workforce that difference had grown to $7000.
Across the board, undergraduates earned a median salary of $75,000 per year in 2024, 5.6 per cent higher than in 2023.
The University of New England had the highest-paid graduates in NSW, followed by Charles Sturt University and UNSW.
The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.
