Australia’s forgotten university graduates

For many university graduates, 2020 was a lost year.

Many Australians are still suffering the scars that the COVID-19 pandemic has left on their enterprises and lifestyles. But among the often overlooked casualties are the university graduates of 2019 and 2020. They now face an outlook different from anything their recent predecessors have encountered.

The good news is that their suffering is likely to have a profound impact on the way many universities prepare their future Australian students for the workforce.

In the last decade or so most Australian universities have concentrated on the cash powerhouse of overseas students and, while there are exceptions, universities have not adapted their courses to enable Australian graduates to quickly integrate into the modern business world.

The large employers of graduates, including the big accounting and legal firms, banks and major corporations, have well-established training systems to bridge the gap between universities and modern workplaces.

But those training systems depend on a close integration between the first year graduates and middle-to-top management.

In most enterprises during 2020 executives were working from home so these training systems completely broke down. As a result those who graduated in 2019 and went into large organisations virtually lost a year. Most were among the nation’s brightest. In many cases those graduating out of the 2020 year will need to share the training facilities with the 2019 graduates.

KPMG national chairman Alison Kitchen, commenting in The Australian, explained what happened this way: “We on-boarded 500 graduates in March 2020, and we’ll on-board another 500 in March 2021. And the people we on-boarded in March 2020 almost wholly missed out on 90 per cent of the things that are good about joining KPMG as a graduate in terms of the social interaction, the ability to immediately get involved in meeting people and going to meetings as a note taker and seeing what happens in big transactions and get that variety. They haven’t experienced any of that.

“We are looking at the program and hopefully we can roll out something exciting for the 2021 graduates but we will have to go back and include last year’s. Even though they have been with us for months, they have missed out on an enormous amount of that normal activity.”

Middle-ranking and smaller enterprises do not have the sophisticated training systems of the larger groups. The pressures that arose from the pandemic reduced their already limited scope to train graduates into the modern business world.

Those businesses I spoke to were very frustrated that universities had not made their graduates employment-ready. But, of course, for the most part they have never undertaken this task and few universities have the skills to provide the service.

In the last decade universities’ efforts have been directed towards attracting and adapting to vast numbers of overseas students. For some it seemed like Australian students were an add-on.

Sadly the boards at most universities thought the rivers of overseas students and their cash would be never-ending and invested large amounts into real estate assets including long term leases which now look to be of problematic value.

We will need to wait until 2022 to determine just how big the overseas student exodus has been but, almost certainly, it will be substantial.

To adapt, many of the larger universities are lowering their entry criteria which, longer term, is a dangerous step because it will reduce the quality of graduates.

And by taking that step the top universities are sucking students away from smaller universities which then potentially suffer a double blow---lower numbers of overseas and Australian students.

But the brighter of those smaller universities have cottoned on to the gap in the market and are promoting their courses on the basis that they incorporate regular employer interactions so that graduates come out of the university ready for the workforce and very employable.

The experiences of the 2019 and 2020 graduates will filter down into the marketplace and those smaller universities with good courses and teaching staff may attract a lot of students.

Meanwhile many larger employers have traditionally been attracted by students who have undertaken arts and similar courses to broaden their outlook and increase their ability to tackle problems from different directions.

Sadly, recent research by the Institute of Public Affairs shows that large numbers of the subjects involved in these areas have been captured by politically correct teaching.

There is nothing wrong with such teaching being incorporated but it must be part of a wide spectrum of viewpoints if these courses are to teach students how to think on a broader scale.

The government has made these courses much more expensive and reduced the costs of those that have a direct job orientation.

The combination of the dominance of political correctness and higher costs may reduce those able to gain the benefits that come from a fully rounded arts degree.