A post-Covid cocktail of economic factors is driving Australian students to breathe easier about their career aspirations despite working harder to bankroll their studies, according to the vice-chancellor of a leading regional institution.
University of Newcastle boss Alex Zelinsky said conflicting trends of bounty and hardship were moulding students’ behaviour in a way that the sector and employers could not ignore.
Young Australians live in a world of “full” employment and have never tasted recession, he said. Nevertheless, most students must work to support themselves and many consider home ownership out of reach following a nationwide surge in property prices.
All this has fostered an unhurried attitude to study, an itinerant approach to work and an aversion to traditional employer-employee relationships. Graduates are “chancing their arm in the gig economy”, Professor Zelinsky told Times Higher Education. “They kind of live from day to day.”
He said living costs had been a major driver in students’ changing habits. Surveys at Newcastle had found that around 85 per cent of students worked at least a few hours a week, and 20 per cent for 30 hours or more.
Work was plentiful, with unemployment rates in Newcastle running about a percentage point below the national average of slightly over 4 per cent. And with rent and food prices mounting, paid work was a necessity rather than a choice.
Professor Zelinsky said roughly three in 10 Newcastle students occupied an intermediate space between full-time and part-time study, unable to manage a typical full-time load of four subjects per semester, but with capacity for more than two.
Some students wanted their classes confined to two days a week to maximise work time. The university was keen to accommodate this, partly because students often worked in jobs related to their studies. Education students, for example, often took positions as teaching assistants.
“We’re looking at totally redoing our calendars…to suit the students who are working,” he said. Options included weekend classes and intensive sessions in fields such as engineering, where fully online study was impractical.
Recruitment and administration efforts are also adapting to the new reality. Binary classifications like full- and part-time are becoming increasingly obsolete, with universities adopting more complex segmentations. Newcastle markets its offerings to eight different student “personas”, including “safety seekers”, “casual cruisers” and “focused achievers”.
Professor Zelinsky said the emerging student mindset had also encouraged a resurgence of cadetships, as employers sought ways to attract increasingly scarce recruits.
Last year, his university became home to the first Australian Public Service Academy Campus. Latter-year students with data and digital skills are offered paid cadetships and internships on campus, with likely ongoing employment after graduation.
A second academy has opened at James Cook University in northern Queensland, as the civil service brings work options to the regions rather than expecting recruits to relocate to the capitals.
In a similar development, a “technology hub” at the Newcastle headquarters of consultants KPMG houses scores of students and graduates working in client service roles. Professor Zelinsky said the firm had failed to attract local talent through more traditional channels after launching in the city in 2021.
“I [told KPMG], that’s because they’ve already got jobs,” he said, adding that a traditional rationale for traineeships and cadetships – an inexpensive way for employers to check staff out – had now been inverted. “They’re checking you out,” he observed.
