Recent calls to wind-back Australia’s demand-driven university system have received more validation, with The AFR reporting today that Australia is badly oversupplied by law graduates who will never work in law and who are ill-equipped to do anything else:
The leaders of the 41 law schools have enrolled students much faster than the overall growth of their respective universities…
Law student numbers are out of hand. Nearly 15,000 finish their degree each year, and enter a market where there are only 66,000 solicitors. These graduate numbers far transcend the growth in the legal market. Once upon a time the government of the day linked funding of law places to an estimate of numbers required in the legal industry.
But since the cap on admissions was taken away, the universities have turned a deaf ear to the laws of supply and demand. They seek to maximise income by untrammelled recruitment and get access to thousands of federal dollars for every full-time student…
It’s a similar story in IT, where there are too many graduates chasing too few jobs, often crowded-out by temporary foreign workers, according to IT News.
Meanwhile, total outstanding HELP loans have escalated, many of which will never be repaid, putting increasing pressures on the federal Budget:
Does Australia really need so many people holding expensive degrees, often working in totally unrelated fields?
The more people that have a degree, the more this becomes a basic expectation for employers, leaving those without one further behind. Meanwhile, those that do obtain a degree are experiencing a gradual diminution in their pay, with graduate starting salaries for bachelor degree graduates deteriorating steadily since the 1970s, commensurate with the rise in university participation.
A related side-effect is that employers in Australia no longer bother to recruit school leavers and train them up. Instead, they tend to recruit university graduates and then whinge when they don’t have the requisite skills. In the meantime, students are forgoing earnings while they study, while sinking tens-of-thousands of dollars of sunk costs into gaining their degree.
Something’s gotta give.
