Job paying Aussie graduates $100,000 straight out of university revealed

A survey has revealed the careers paying the most for Aussie university graduates – and the ones that aren’t so lucrative.

The job paying graduates $100,000 straight out of university has been revealed. Picture: QILT Graduate Outcomes Survey and iStock

A new survey has revealed the careers that are seeing Australian university students being paid six figures right after graduating.

The survey, run by the government endorsed Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT), received more than 131,000 responses from Australian graduates.

The responses are from graduates who attended an Australian higher education institution between March 2021 and February 2022, with people typically surveyed within four months of graduating.

The data revealed the median salaries for undergraduates in Australia for 2022 was $68,000, with 78 per cent of graduates in full-time employment.

The respondents with the highest full-time salaries straight out of university were those who studied dentistry, with a median salary of $100,000.

The second highest paying graduate roles were in medicine, with a median salary of $79,000, followed by social work at $75,000.

Dentistry graduates came out on top with the highest paying median salaries straight out of university.

While this is great news for students currently studying in these areas, the survey responses also revealed the study areas that produced lower median salaries for graduates.

These areas were pharmacy graduates, with a median salary of $52,000 in 2022, tourism, hospitality, personal services, sport and recreation at $54,800 and creative arts at $56,000.

While they may not have the highest median pay, the graduates who were most likely to receive full-time employment were those who studied rehabilitation, with 96.5 per cent of respondents being employed full time.

This was closely followed by pharmacy graduates at 96.2 per cent and those who studied medicine at 93 per cent.

Creative art students were the least likely to be full-time employed, with a rate of 57.3 per cent in 2022, followed by tourism, hospitality, personal services, sport and recreation at 65.1.

QILT also tracked the discrepancy in pay between recently graduated male and female workers.

“Over the longer term, the gender gap in graduate salaries has tended to narrow, though change has been slow, and the gender gap remains,” analysis of the survey outcomes states.

“In 2009, female undergraduates earned $47,000, which was $3000 or 6 per cent lower than their male counterparts.”

This graph shows the median full-time salaries by study area for 2021 and 2022. Picture: QILT Graduate Outcomes Survey

In 2022, the gender pay gap in undergraduates decreased to $2000 or 2.9 per cent, with a median salary of $67,400 for females and $69,400 for males.

This is down from 3.9 per cent in 2021.

“Similarly, the gender gap in postgraduate coursework salaries has declined over time, with females earning $15,000 or 19.2 per cent lower in 2009 in comparison with a gender pay gap of $10,800 or 10.8 per cent in 2022,” the survey outcomes noted.

The paper noted that the gender gap in undergraduate studies can, in part, be explained by the fact that “females are more likely to graduate from study areas which receive lower levels of remuneration”.

However, it is also the case that at the undergraduate level, females earn less overall than their male counterparts in the majority of study areas.

Rehabilitation graduates had the highest rate of full time employment after graduation. Picture: QILT Graduate Outcomes Survey

Tourism, hospitality, personal services, sport and recreation is one of the study areas that has the highest gender pay gap among graduates, with women earning on average $9400 less than men.

Next was architecture and built environment with a $8000 gap, creative arts with a $5000 gap, and law and paralegal studies with a $4800 gap.

“In 2022, agriculture and environmental studies, social work, computing and information systems, and business and management were the exceptions where female undergraduate median salaries are higher than or equal to their male counterparts,” the QILT analysis of the data noted.

“This demonstrates that beyond subject choice, the gender gap in median graduate salaries persists due to a range of other factors such as occupation, age, experience, personal factors, and possible inequalities within workplaces.”

Originally published as Job paying Aussie graduates $100,000 straight out of university revealed