Employment Outcomes
Each year a national survey of university graduates is undertaken, exploring graduate outcomes and destinations. Formally the Graduate Destination Survey (GDS) but is now called the Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS) is collected from November in a given year and May the following year. These survey results are published on the Quality Indicators of Teaching and Learning (QILT) website, with two years of survey data aggregated in the display.
One of the key measures of graduate outcomes is the percentage of graduates who are in full-time employment within six months of graduating. Excluded from this measure are students who are not seeking full-time employment or students who are continuing study.
Each university receives a percentage score reflecting the percentage of survey respondents who said they were in full-time employment within six months of graduating. A confidence interval is then applied to this score depending on the representativeness of the sample collected in the survey. This means that if 100 per cent of graduates from that university in that year were surveyed and all responded the actual score would be somewhere in the range of the confidence interval. The confidence interval is shown with the line markers below.
CDU is shown in the below graph in the orange column, compared with all 40 Australian Table A Providers. There are six other Australian institutions with a score in the same confidence interval as CDU. Therefore, it is incorrect to say that CDU is better or worse than any institution in the confidence interval range; but we can say that CDU is in the same range as those institutions.
On this basis CDU is one of seven Australian universities with the top graduate employment outcomes.
Graduate Salary Outcomes
CDU has also ranked as a top national performer in The Good Universities Guide 2018, released in August 2016 by the Good Education Group.
CDU achieved a rating of five stars for overall salary, with a median graduate salary of $60,000, and overall employment, with an 82 per cent graduate employment rate.
The University also received the top employment rate or median salary across six specific fields of study. CDU law graduates are the best paid in Australia, with a median salary of $73,000. The university also took out equal top spot in the teacher education category with Edith Cowan University, at $62,000.
In terms of graduate employment rates, CDU took out top spot for engineering (96 per cent); humanities, culture and social sciences (81 per cent); psychology (73 per cent); and science and mathematics (79 per cent).