Should we tell high school students to go to university? It feels wrong to tell kids not to go to university but are we giving them the full story?
trainee graduates. The latter were also debt-free.
For decades, higher education has been a marker of success and a gateway to better jobs. But times have changed. Here’s a few reasons why… International enrolments are booming, so there’s a lot more competition for those elusive graduate jobs; medicine might be the only ‘safe bet’. According to the Grattan Institute, medicine, nursing and education were the only disciplines in which earnings grew between 2006 and 2016 for early-career graduates aged 25 to 34. Overall, the rate of professional job growth has slowed while the number of students competing for those jobs has increased. Student debt has skyrocketed.
Rosie Clarke, Editor, SchoolNews editor@school-news.com.au
The amount of total debt rose by more than $25 billion between 2012 and 2017. The average amount of student debt per person is now $19,100 and takes nine years to pay off. In 2014, 69 percent of recent university graduates secured a full-time job within four months compared to 84 percent of apprentice and
While medical graduates are the highest earners, they also have the most debt (between $100,000 and $150,000). While the compulsory repayment threshold for the 2018-19 income year was $51,957 the average graduate salary was only around $56,000. Things don’t seem to get much better with career progression, either. Millennials today, a few years older than current high schoolers, are getting smaller wage rises and spending more of their salary on ballooning rent than older workers.
Is uni worth it? Forty percent of humanities graduates will earn the same as (or less than) the median school leaver. Law graduates will earn 20 percent more. Across most disciplines, Australians will still
earn more money if they have a degree just not as much more as they would have 10 years ago. On the other hand, travel is cheaper than it’s ever been: in the early 1980s, flights to Europe would have cost around $9500 in today’s money. A return flight to Berlin will only cost $1200 in 2019. It makes sense that ‘gap years’ are growing in popularity, then, with young people travelling before they saddle up for a ‘mind mortgage’ to get their degree. Based on the statistics, university is still the best chance young Aussies have to earn a lot of money. However, it’s not the safe bet that it once was and Year 12s should think carefully before they sign themselves up for more than nine years of debt. HECS matters: having debt isn’t nice and it does put a dampener on that exciting first wage slip.
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Term 1, 2019 | school-news.com.au