Students from these Australian universities earn the most after graduating

tudents who graduated from major universities in Sydney and Queensland are earning more money than students who graduated from universities in Melbourne, a new survey has found.

The government-funded Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching survey involved 40,000 Australian university graduates from the class of 2014.

Graduates from mostly rural-based Charles Sturt University enjoy the highest median full-time salary four years after graduating at $78,300, followed by the University of New South Wales in Sydney at $77,500, and Central Queensland University at $77,200.

It’s a far cry from the salaries at the bottom of the scale, mainly comprised of universities in Victoria.

The lowest earners are graduates from the University of Melbourne are earning a median salary of $65,000, graduates from RMIT University in Melbourne earning $65,400, and graduates from Federation University in Victoria earn the lowest at $64,000.

You can see the difference in median salaries in the chart below.

Short (2013-15) and medium-term (2016-18) undergraduate median full-time salaries by university (three years data combined, $)

While nine out of 10 students have a full-time job a few years after graduating, they are taking longer to find full-time employment than they did before the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-2008, especially those with generalist degrees (typically arts, liberal studies, humanities and the social sciences).

Graduates from Charles Sturt were the quickest to find work after graduating.

93.6% of students from that university were employed in full-time work three years after graduating, Murdoch University had a 93.2% employment rate, and the University of Technology in Sydney had an employment rate of 92.7%.

The survey also showed the gender pay gap is still apparent.

In 2015, the gender gap in graduate median salaries was $5,000 or 8.3%.

In 2018, for the same cohort of graduates three years later, the gender gap in graduate median salaries was $5,100 or 7%.

You can see the disparity in the chart below.

Undergraduate median salaries, short-term (2015) and medium-term (2018), of those people employed full-time