Backup - Communicating with Recent Graduates: Making Sense of the GDS
The Graduate Destination Survey (GDS), with the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) or Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire (PREQ) attached, is sent to all new Australian university graduates every year. The aim is to take a snapshot of what recent graduates are doing in terms of their post-graduation activities and to gather information from them about their higher education experience.
Employment Rates and Starting Salaries
By way of example, employment rates for the years 1990 to 2001 are shown in Table 1 (see Appendix). These figures are based on the group of respondents who are available for full-time employment at the time of the GDS. This group includes those who are in full-time employment and those who are seeking full-time employment. This latter group includes people who were not working and seeking full-time employment as well as those who were working on a part-time or casual basis and seeking full-time employment.
This mode of analysis ensures that graduates who were not in the full-time labour market (such as those in full-time study, those who were exclusively in the part-time labour market and those who were unavailable for paid work) are excluded from the figures. Labour market related analyses that do not exclude graduates who are outside the labour market should be avoided.
It can also be useful (depending on the analysis being undertaken) to take into account those graduates in full-time employment who held the same job during their study. Differing enrolment profiles at institutions can disguise dissimilar employment rates.
As with any analysis of data, the method chosen will require a consideration of what issue is being addressed and, of course, the method chosen should reflect acceptable social science practice. The annual GDS reports canvass a variety of method-related issues (GCCA 2002b).
Starting salaries
The figures the GCCA generally reports are based on Australian citizen and permanent resident bachelor degree graduates aged less than 25 and in their first full-time employment in Australia. This group is used to establish base-line starting salary figures to track changes in the earnings of new graduates.
Most comparisons are made against an annualised measure of average weekly earnings based on Australian Bureau of Statistics figures (ABS 2002) gathered at the time of the GDS. The annualised figure is based on male full-time earnings. Comparisons between salaries for female graduates with average weekly earnings figures for all females would see the former seemingly well paid, earning far in excess of the latter. This means that the comparison of starting salaries for female graduates with that measure may be seen as problematic. It is intended, however, that the average earnings figure be used as a constant, and not in a prescriptive manner.
However, Graduate Starting Salaries reports (see GCCA 2002a, for example) discuss earnings for the population aged 20 to 24 and refer to average weekly earnings figures for the combined workforce (males and females), and for the female workforce.
For the purposes of demonstration, Table 2 (see Appendix) shows graduate starting salaries from the 2001 Graduate Destination Survey. Asterisked cells indicate those where there are no, or fewer than ten, cases. The GCCA always warns users about small cell sizes in data analysis in order to avoid the misinterpretation of results.
Figure 1 (see Appendix) shows changes in starting salaries relative to average weekly earnings for the years 1977 to 2001. A zero point is not used as the analysis of graduates’ starting salaries concentrates on changes across time and not on an absolute comparison against the average earnings figure.
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