How many times have you heard the following questions: ``Where does a Maths degree lead me?'' ``Yeh! but outside the teaching profession, where does the maths degree lead my son or daughter?''
As I am a point of contact for course advice, these questions are constantly being asked of me.
One way to answer satisfactorily these questions was to survey our past graduates. The survey was posted at the beginning of December with a return date of 24th December 1993. I received 137 responses after writing to all 517 graduates of the Bachelor of Mathematics program since 1985, a 26.5% response rate. 39.5% of the respondents had graduated between the years of 1990 and 1993. From 1991 the Bachelor of Computer Science was introduced, so from this date onwards the Bachelor of Mathematics no longer enrolled students who wished to major in Computer Science. The questions and results appear below.
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Let us look at the figures for Question 8 (``To which industry does your employer belong?'') (Figure 2). Unlike graduates from the University of Birmingham (Figure 1), 33% of whom are employed in financial services and 23% in management services (figures taken from the University's Mathematics \& Statistics Prospectus 1993), 30.9% of the graduates surveyed from the University of Wollongong are employed in the Public Service. The ``other'' category included a varied number of responses, indicating that the graduates surveyed didn't understand the list of industries we used, so I have listed my interpretation of their responses against the appropriate industry, alongside the actual responses.
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The industry categories used in the two surveys are different, as I adopted those used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Use of these industries would allow comparison with other ABS and government statistics. I found that:
Another point of interest is that 77% are currently employed on a full-time basis. This compares more than favourably with the figure of 44.1% of new graduates being in full-time employment as quoted by the Graduate Council of Australia Ltd (Higher Education News 1993) in the summary of results of its annual Graduate Destination Survey 1993 (GDS).
Of the people responding to my survey, 49.2% were employed within one month of graduating and 61.3% were employed within six months of graduating. This is very impressive indeed, considering the national unemployment rate for 1993 was 11% and only 3% of survey participants were actively seeking employment.
It is encouraging to find that 82.6% were employed in work that was directly related to their field of study, adding fuel to the argument that mathematics is not just a job but a way of life.
It seems that employment prospects for mathematics graduates have been favourable for a long time.
At a public lecture given by Professor Austin Keane in 1965 he stated
\midspace{8cm} \caption{Fig 1: Birmingham University - Graduate Employment Destinations } \midspace{9.5cm} \caption{Fig 2: University of Wollongong - Graduate Employment Destinations }
He went on to say:
On the requirements of industry in 1965, he commented:
Since 1965, the range of opportunities has not changed for the worse, and if anything the employment outlook has broadened to include positions in finance. Our survey showed that 8.8% of participants were involved in finance/property related fields - from the Birmingham data (Figure 1), we expect that this is an international trend.
In the publication Graduate Profiles 1993, produced by the University of Wollongong, 16.1% of graduates surveyed were 21 years of age (page 88) and 18.7% grossed between $25,000 and $29,999 (page 94), while from the small maths sample the total median starting salary of a BMath graduate was $33,000. The Graduate Council of Australia Ltd quotes that ``overall, salaries for new graduates have remained stalled in the period 1991-93. The median starting salary for new graduates of $25,500 showed no growth.'' (Higher Education News 1994)
I would be interested in reading the findings of others who have recently surveyed their graduates. Certainly, the employment destinations of our graduates are useful in promoting mathematics as a career, and in curriculum planning.
Department of Mathematics
The University of Wollongong
Wollongong, NSW 2522