This site has often questioned the merits of Australia’s demand-driven university system, which is producing far too many graduates for the economy to digest, costing both students and the Budget a fortune.
I have previously likened this demand-driven university system to a form of quantitative easing. That is, universities have turned into ‘degree factories’, whereby they teach as many students as possible to accumulate Commonwealth government funding through HELP/HECS debts.
This ‘churn’ approach has seen the dramatic lowering of entrance scores such that almost anyone can now enroll for a university course, regardless of merit, flooding the economy with graduates.
Evidence of this university ‘quantitative easing’ was provided in the most recent Department of Employment skills shortages report, which showed there were a record 1 million domestic students enrolled with a higher education provider, 730,000 of which were enrolled in bachelor degrees – an extraordinary amount of higher education students in an economy of 24.5 million:
Meanwhile, bachelor degree graduate employment outcomes are falling and are at “historically low levels”:
With the extreme competition among university graduates, many are undertaking unpaid internships in a bid to gain experience and increase their chances of securing a meaningful job in their field of study. However, this has raised concern that more than 500,000 students over the last five years may have had placements that were unlawful – effectively a form of black market ‘slave labour’. From The Australian:
Andrew Stewart, the John Bray professor of law at the University of Adelaide, found 58 per cent of people aged 18 to 29 had performed some kind of unpaid work experience.
…the number of potentially unlawful placements was based on students who undertook an internship as part of a tertiary course where they performed work that otherwise would have been done by a paid employee…
Professor Stewart said internships that included productive work that benefited the organisation “should be treated as employment and attract the minimum wage, even if the intern agrees to work for free”.
And in a troubling finding, Professor Stewart found limited evidence that undertaking unpaid work for experience helped graduates find work. “Many people believe that it does,” he said. “But there doesn’t appear to be any clear evidence to that effect.”
Less than a third of people they surveyed were offered a job at the end of the internship and less than half received a letter of recommendation…
Deanna Grant-Smith, a senior business lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, said… “I am really worried there’s a whole generation of people who think it’s normal to work for free and think this is the only way they can get a job after university”…
It’s called an “internship” because that sounds a lot sexier and less exploitative than “free labour”. But if a private firm is seeking volunteers to do work that would otherwise be paid, then it is clear exploitation.
When viewed alongside the widespread abuse of foreign worker visas and the disappearance of full-time jobs:
And unprecedented underemployment:
It’s clear that the labour market has become increasingly hostile to younger Australians.
