ComparED website looks better but it has a data problem

The government’s new ComparED website helps prospective higher education students choose the best course for them.

Kudos to federal Education Minister Dan Tehan and his department for producing a new website, compared.edu.au, to help prospective higher-education stud­ents make decisions about choosing courses.

The new site, launched last week, appears to offer the same set of information that used to be available on the Quality Indicators of Teaching and Learning website but in a more easily access­ible, better presented, form.

As with QILT, information seekers can compare courses using graduate employment rates, graduate salaries and the course satisfaction of both stud­ents and graduates. They can compare this data for whole institutions or drill down and make comparisons at course level.

The data relies on large-scale surveys, which higher-education institutions offer to students and graduates, that is analysed by the Australian National University’s Social Research Centre.

A lot of people take part — more than 130,000 in the latest 2019 Graduate Outcomes Survey just published — which means it’s a rich and reliable data set.

All of this is good because it’s more important than ever for students to make informed choices about what they study.

However there is more that needs to be done. While the new ComparED website looks good, the underlying data — which has not changed in the transition from the old QILT website — has a methodological issue which the minister needs to address, and provide the resources to fix.

The problem is illustrated by a media release put out on Monday by a triumphant Charles Sturt University based on the latest graduate employment figures that are now available on the ComparED website.

“Charles Sturt tops graduate employment rate for fourth consecut­ive year,” crowed the university in its release.

Technically, the claim is true, but its also misleading.

On the face of it, the latest figures show that of the 2018 Charles Sturt bachelor degree graduates who were available for full-time work, 86.4 per cent had full-time jobs within four months of completing their course — the highest rate of any Australian university.

But there’s a contributing reason­ why Charles Sturt regular­ly tops the graduate employment outcomes. It’s because nearly half of its undergraduate students study part-time (a far higher proportion­ than most universities) and most of these are likely to have jobs while they study.

So it stands to reason that when they graduate they will continue to have a job and this makes Charles Sturt’s graduate employment rate look good — better, in fact, than it really is on a like-for-like comparison. And Charles Sturt is not the only university to have made such dubious boasts about its job outcomes.

So minister, in the interests of giving prospective students ­reliable information — and ­ensuring the success of the new ComparED website — this ­problem needs a statistical fix.