Beyond Salary: Which Australian Degrees Deliver the Best Graduate Outcomes?

Story Pitch

Students are frequently encouraged to choose university degrees based on passion, reputation or salary expectations. However, graduate success is influenced by a broader range of factors, including employment opportunities, labour force participation and long-term career outcomes. This story investigates how graduate outcomes differ across Australian fields of study using data from the Graduate Outcomes Survey 2024.

Through a series of interactive visualisations, the analysis moves beyond salary rankings to explore the complex relationship between earnings, employment and workforce participation. The findings reveal that high salaries do not always correspond with stronger employment outcomes and that some disciplines consistently outperform others across multiple measures. Health-related fields such as Dentistry, Medicine, Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy demonstrate strong performance across most indicators, while several creative and humanities-related disciplines experience comparatively weaker employment outcomes despite maintaining active workforce participation.

To provide a more comprehensive assessment, a Graduate Success Index is developed by combining multiple outcome measures into a single ranking framework. This approach highlights how graduate success is multidimensional and cannot be understood through salary alone. The story offers prospective students, educators and policymakers valuable insights into the factors that shape graduate outcomes and career opportunities in Australia.

By transforming complex survey data into accessible and engaging visual narratives, this story challenges common assumptions about university success and encourages readers to consider a broader definition of graduate achievement.

Introduction

Choosing a university degree is one of the most important decisions students make, and salary is often viewed as the primary indicator of future success. Degrees associated with high earnings are frequently perceived as offering the best career opportunities and long-term value. However, salary alone provides only a partial picture of graduate outcomes. Employment prospects, workforce participation, and the ability to secure full-time work are equally important measures that influence a graduate’s career success and financial stability.

This data story examines graduate outcomes across a range of Australian fields of study using data from the 2024 Graduate Outcomes Survey. By analysing multiple indicators, including median salary, full-time employment rates, overall employment outcomes, and labour force participation, the analysis moves beyond a single measure of success to provide a more comprehensive understanding of graduate performance. Through a series of visualisations, the story explores how different disciplines compare across these outcomes and identifies which degrees consistently deliver strong results for graduates.

The analysis reveals that the highest-paying degree is not necessarily the strongest performer overall, highlighting the importance of evaluating graduate success through multiple dimensions rather than salary alone.

Chart 1

The first chart reveals substantial differences in graduate salaries across Australian fields of study. Dentistry graduates reported the highest median salary at $103,300, while Pharmacy graduates earned the lowest at $59,500, creating a salary gap of $43,800. Several health-related disciplines, including Medicine and Dentistry, dominate the top of the ranking, while creative and service-oriented fields tend to report lower earnings.

However, salary alone does not determine whether a degree delivers strong graduate outcomes. A high-paying degree may still face challenges relating to employment opportunities, workforce participation, or access to full-time work. To better understand overall graduate success, the next section examines employment outcomes across fields of study and investigates whether the highest-paying degrees also provide the strongest employment prospects.

Chart 2






While salary is often considered the primary indicator of graduate success, employment outcomes reveal another important dimension of performance. Figure 2 demonstrates substantial variation in full-time employment rates across fields of study, ranging from 47.8% for Art and Design graduates to 95.3% for Occupational Therapy graduates. The employment gap of 47.5 percentage points highlights the significant influence that degree choice can have on a graduate’s ability to secure full-time work. Notably, some disciplines with excellent employment outcomes do not appear among the highest-paying fields identified in Figure 1. This suggests that salary alone is not sufficient to evaluate graduate success and reinforces the need to consider multiple outcome measures when comparing degree performance.

Chart 3

Figure 3 combines salary and employment outcomes to provide a more comprehensive assessment of graduate success. The upper-right quadrant represents degrees that achieve both high salaries and high employment rates, indicating strong overall performance. Dentistry stands out as the strongest performer, combining the highest median salary with a high employment rate. Medicine and Occupational Therapy also demonstrate strong outcomes, although Occupational Therapy achieves this through exceptionally high employment rather than the highest salary levels.

In contrast, Art and Design is positioned in the lower-left quadrant, reflecting both low salary and low employment outcomes. Several disciplines appear in the mixed-outcomes category, suggesting that strong performance in one measure does not necessarily translate into success across all indicators. These findings reinforce the argument that evaluating graduate outcomes requires consideration of multiple dimensions rather than salary alone. # Chart 4

Figure 4 presents a Graduate Success Index that combines salary, employment rate, and labour force participation into a single measure. Dentistry achieved the highest overall score (93.4), followed by Engineering (89.6) and Medicine (88.9), indicating strong performance across all graduate outcome measures. In contrast, Art & Design recorded the lowest overall score (66.0), reflecting comparatively weaker outcomes. The average index score was approximately 81, highlighting substantial variation in graduate success across fields of study. These findings suggest that evaluating graduate outcomes using a composite measure provides a more comprehensive assessment than considering salary or employment alone.

Visualisation 5

Figure 5 examines the underlying drivers of graduate success across selected fields of study. The results show that health-related disciplines consistently achieve strong outcomes across all performance indicators. Dentistry, Medicine, Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy demonstrate high levels of full-time employment, overall employment and labour force participation, indicating strong labour market demand and successful graduate transitions into employment. In contrast, fields such as Art & Design, Biological Sciences and Communication & Journalism exhibit lower employment outcomes despite maintaining relatively high labour force participation rates. This suggests that graduates actively participate in the labour market but face greater challenges securing full-time employment opportunities. Salary outcomes also vary considerably between disciplines. Dentistry records the highest median salary ($103.3k), while Pharmacy demonstrates strong employment outcomes despite comparatively lower salary levels. This indicates that graduate success is influenced by multiple dimensions rather than salary alone. Overall, the heatmap supports the findings from Figure 4 by showing that the highest-ranked disciplines consistently perform well across multiple indicators, whereas lower-ranked disciplines tend to display weaknesses in one or more outcome measures. Therefore, graduate success appears to be driven by a combination of employment opportunities, labour force participation and salary outcomes rather than any single factor.

Key Findings / Conclusion

Across all five visualisations, clear differences are observed in graduate outcomes between fields of study. Health-related disciplines consistently outperform other fields across employment, participation and salary measures. Dentistry emerges as the strongest overall performer due to its combination of high salary and strong labour market outcomes. Conversely, Art & Design, Biological Sciences and Communication & Journalism record comparatively weaker outcomes, particularly in employment-related measures. The analysis demonstrates that graduate success is multidimensional and cannot be evaluated solely through salary. Instead, a combination of employment prospects, workforce participation and earnings provides a more comprehensive understanding of graduate outcomes across Australian university disciplines.

Generative AI Acknowledgement

Generative AI (ChatGPT, OpenAI) was used during this project to assist with:

• R coding support and debugging

• Visualisation design suggestions

• Grammar and writing improvements

The final analysis, visualisations, conclusions and submission materials were independently reviewed and validated by the author.

References

Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching. (2024). Graduate outcomes survey 2024. https://www.qilt.edu.au

R Core Team. (2025). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.r-project.org

Posit Software, PBC. (2025). RStudio IDE. https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio

Wickham, H., Chang, W., Henry, L., Pedersen, T. L., Takahashi, K., Wilke, C., Woo, K., & Yutani, H. (2025). ggplot2: Create elegant data visualisations using the grammar of graphics. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org

Sievert, C. (2025). Plotly for R. https://plotly.com/r

Wickham, H., Averick, M., Bryan, J., Chang, W., McGowan, L., François, R., Grolemund, G., Hayes, A., Henry, L., Hester, J., Kuhn, M., Pedersen, T. L., Miller, E., Bache, S., Müller, K., Ooms, J., Robinson, D., Seidel, D., Spinu, V., Takahashi, K., Vaughan, D., Wilke, C., Woo, K., & Yutani, H. (2025). Tidyverse. https://www.tidyverse.org