Graduating on to the dole in South Australia

Is this the promise of the future for our young people? Like a Raymond Carver short story, full of jaded expectations, broken promises and regret?

Some years ago I was a programs director and senior lecturer at a large university in Melbourne. I was responsible for about 1500 students, 50 staff and nine programs split over the TAFE and higher education sectors. I taught journalism and poetry (an odd double, I know) and organisational systems in another faculty. The programs I led earned the university about $1M per year after wages.

The university always wanted more money. So half of my time was spent writing new degrees and full fee short courses and launching them. I never wavered from the principle that the graduates had to be armed with the latest capabilities and skills to help themget a job. Then the university introduced a new raft of KPI's, none of which focused on employability. I left 12 months later.

The bachelor degree has now replaced Year 12 as the basic requirement for employment. So what's the weight and value of the old matriculation year worth? Producing tens of thousands of graduates devalues the qualification as well as the university that supplies them. Will we need 'super degrees'?

Nationally, between 2009-2014, bachelor degree enrolments grew by 26 per cent and enrolments in master's degrees skyrocketed by 41 per cent – in part to escape the dole queues.

It's hard to sustain the myth that there is an ever-increasing need for graduates that is going unmet, especially in communications, law and engineering.

All is far from well with science graduates too. A recent Grattan report examined theresults of the Commonwealth Government's push to increase enrolments in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses.

The report's author, Andrew Norton, found that, "science bachelor degree graduates generally have worse employment outcomes than graduates in most other disciplines: fewer find full time jobs when they graduate, fewer have full time jobs three years after graduation, and fewer use what they learnt in their job."

It's odd that we live in the digital age yet the industrial revolution ethos of 'more and more', still rules. In Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times, he likened the steam driven pistons of the machine age to an elephant's head, moving up and down in a mad and melancholy motion. For many South Australian graduates of the 'Big Three' universities, hard times comes from watching the job rejection letters mount.

The problem isn't a lack of highly qualified graduates. The problem is a lack of jobs.Our large universities must take the state's high unemployment rate in to account and start capping undergraduate courses.