Since the dawn of higher education, healthy rivalry between educational institutions has been part of the package: UTS vs University of SydneyUniversity of Sydney vs University of Melbourne, Australian National University vs everyone else, etc etc.
Some of them – the so-called Group of Eight (Go8) unis, like UNSW, University of Sydney, and University of Melbourne – carry with them the prestige of sandstone buildings and a rep for being ‘better’ than the rest.
But the new Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, acquired and reported on by Fairfax, found graduates from the Go8 crew earn NO MORE on average than those who hit the books elsewhere.
In fact, when controlled for cognitive ability, you can stand to earn as much as 10% more for attending a technical university like UTS and Sydney or Melbourne’s RMIT University.
Basically UTS / RMIT students be like:
There’s a whole host of interesting data to be taken from the survey, which is currently in mass headline-generating mode:
- There’s a 15% earnings premium for attending one of the Innovative Research Universities (like La Trobe or Griffith)
- There’s a 0% earnings premium for regional universities (they’re on par with the Go8 lot)
NB: these findings only relate to full-time employees, meaning self-employed grads who make a killing aren’t captured by the research. It’s also worth noting that Go8 unis tend to enrol students in lower-paid disciplines like the arts and science, which probs would have skewed the results somewhat.
The survey also compared the benefits of a Bachelor’s degree vs dropping out of high school, finding that a BA increases earnings by 41% for guys, and 32% for women, compared to those who complete Year 11 or below.
Moral of the story:
No. You are not Dave Grohl. Stay in school.
Via Fairfax
