Tasmanian Graduates Can’t Access ‘Middle-tier’ Professional Jobs

Imagine you did everything ‘right’.

Imagine you went through a poor school, where formal teaching is often disconnected from actual learning, which is primarily done on Khan Academy outside of school. You then decide to do a ‘good’ degree when you graduate. You go to the local university to minimise your student costs by living with your parents. You work very hard, keep up to date with assignments and finish with a good GPA. You assume – quite reasonably – that doing this will provide you with a high-quality entry-level professional job that will allow you to contribute to society.

For a very large number of graduates, that assumption is wrong.

According to Prosple, only 3% of graduates get a graduate program – the equivalent of an apprenticeship for undergraduates¹. For many employers, graduate programs are the only way for inexperienced staff to receive the training they desperately need. Junior roles often require two or three years of experience, and finding programs that do not can be difficult. Otherwise, the alternative is to find a job that does not require the degree, meaning the three years spent getting an undergraduate degree become far more difficult to financially justify.

This is an Australian-wide phenomenon. However, the University of Tasmania is the primary pathway into professional employment in Tasmania, particularly for young people who want to stay local and minimise student costs whilst studying. Despite UTAS pocketing hundreds of millions of annual funding from the state government, who presumably do this to support education standards in Tasmania, help in finding employment after graduation is limited. Searching for discipline-specific internships and graduate programs on the Career Connect website often returns few or unrelated positions. Career counselling appointments are no longer bookable, and the career events that do happen tend to focus on resume formatting or interview techniques over genuine opportunities to get a foot in the door.

Even here, generic templates, trite platitudes and self-recorded mock interviews one could easily find online are frequently more common than genuinely useful advice.

Even if one were to assume this is well-intentioned, it does not address the crux of the problem – a lack of opportunities where graduates are given entry-level apprenticeship-like jobs providing structured pathways for developing in-demand skills.

This is problematic not just for young people, but for everyone. People need low-level jobs to move up the professional hierarchy. Computer science, for instance, has a bottleneck for graduate roles, as AI takes more entry-level jobs²; however, senior professionals in Computer Science are still in high and growing demand³.

Leading demographers have noted that an aging population is likely to exacerbate economic harms from skills shortages even further⁴⁵, yet, at the same time, we have youth unemployment that is more than double what it is in the general population⁶. Moreover, the industries hiring the most young people are unskilled jobs like hospitality and labouring⁷.

The data does not break this down conclusively, but it would be interesting to see if we have more young people working as waiters who are trying to find jobs as accountants, or labourers trying to find apprenticeships, than there are young people employed in those professions. Especially if this is happening at a time when meeting someone who cannot find a handyman to do a job for them becomes increasingly common.

If left untreated, this is an economic disaster not just for the young but for everyone. What is the point of promoting and subsidising higher education if we are not willing to invest in pathways for graduates to use their skills to contribute to society?

Without this, expanding higher education is a nice-sounding policy that, in practice, creates frustration, waste, and large-scale demoralisation to the young people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing.