Welcome and session overview

G'day, and welcome to the Choosing Your Uni National Virtual Expo. I'm Rob Malicki, and I'm a little bit excited about this session because we're talking about an institution I don't normally get to talk a lot about, and that is Avondale University. I'm coming to you today from Garigal land in Sydney, this part of the Eora Nation. I pay my respects to the traditional custodians.

Before we get into this session, I want to let you know what's coming up in the next 20 minutes. If you're joining me live, thanks so much. You can ask any of your questions or make any comments via the chat, whether it's here on the Session Hub page or via Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc. If you're watching the recording of this session, you can ask all of your questions via the Choosing Your Uni Discord. This is a place where you can ask very broad, general questions about university, or you can also get into your specific circumstances and what you need to know. For parents, we have a Facebook community. Details of all these things are down in the session description.

So, Avondale University. What are we going to be covering in this session? We'll be talking about what it's known for, and it's funny because most people probably haven't heard of it, yet it does some things exceptionally well. We're going to be talking about its strengths, the data on how it performs on a national scale, and I think this will literally blow your mind. I'm also going to give you some comparison universities, so if you're thinking about Avondale, there are some other institutions that should definitely be on your shortlist.

Before we kick off, this whole virtual expo has been made possible thanks to Southern Cross University, who are our major presenting partner. A quick word from them, and then we're going to get straight into this session.

The headline number: Australia's top graduate employment rate

Here's a number that should stop you from scrolling. Avondale University, a place that most people have never heard of, posted a 97.7% graduate employment rate. That's not just a high result. It is the highest result of any university in Australia. Not top ten, not top five. It is number one. So why isn't anyone talking about this institution?

It might be because this university isn't for everybody, and I mean that as a genuine statement, not just a marketing line. This university probably isn't for you if what you're looking for is that big university experience: 40,000 students, a huge campus with hundreds of student clubs, located in the middle of a city. Avondale ain't that. It has 1,500 students in total, which makes it smaller than a lot of high schools. If that kind of size would make you feel boxed in, this isn't your place.

It probably isn't your place either if you're uncomfortable with a traditional Christian environment. Avondale is Seventh-day Adventist. There are chapels, worship opportunities, and faith is woven into the curriculum. You don't have to be a Seventh-day Adventist to go there, but you do have to be okay with being part of that culture, and let's face it, that's not for everybody.

It also probably isn't for you if you're looking to study disciplines like engineering, law, or computer science. The programs are focused on education, nursing, counselling, business, theology, and a few other areas. If your dream degree isn't on that list, you're definitely going to need to look elsewhere.

What defines Avondale: teaching relationships, faith, and location

You're still here. Good, because this uni might be for you. Let's jump into the details, and start by talking about three of the things that I think define Avondale.

The first is the teaching relationship, and it's genuinely different to almost any uni in the country. There are around 56 academic staff and 1,500 students on campus. That ratio is like nothing you would get at a big public university. This isn't a place where you sit in a lecture hall with 300 other people and never speak to your lecturer. Students here get direct access to the people who are teaching them, and that really shows up in the student data. Avondale's student satisfaction is 89.7% on the National QILT Survey, making it one of the top in Australia. It sits basically alongside Bond University. For some context, some of Australia's most famous universities, the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney, are like 20 percentage points lower than Avondale in terms of student satisfaction. That is an absolutely significant difference for the right type of student.

Second, the faith-based identity is real. It's not decorative. Some universities have a religious heritage that's more historical now, more of a coat of arms and a chapel, but less focused on actual practising faith. Avondale is not that. It's an operating Seventh-day Adventist institution. The curriculum includes units on Christian worship and ethics, and there are worship opportunities built into campus life. Service is part of the educational philosophy of this place. It's not just tacked on. If you're someone for whom faith is important and you want to integrate it into your education, not just as a little add-on on the side, this is literally one of the few places in Australia that actually offers that. If you're not that person, that's completely fine, but you should know what you're walking into.

Third, the location shapes everything for this institution. The main campus is at Cooranbong, near Morisset, which is halfway between Sydney and Newcastle. It's semi-rural: green and quiet. Think of it like boarding school grounds, except you're there as an adult and you're choosing to be there. There's also a smaller campus on the North Shore of Sydney, co-located with the Sydney Adventist Hospital, and that's where a lot of the nursing clinical training happens. For most students, though, the Cooranbong campus is the Avondale experience: residential, contained, and community-focused.

Fees and government support

I've got an important caveat around fees and how it all works at Avondale. We have a whole session on Australian government support for university studies, streamed on day one of the virtual expo, and you can find it down in the session catalogue. It covers everything you need to know about HECS-HELP, applying for different university programmes, anything to do with government support, and how you pay back those tuition fees. I've also got an important point on that a little bit later in this presentation.

What you can study: Avondale's academic strengths

Let's talk about what you can study at Avondale and where the institution punches above its weight. The university has four academic schools: Arts and Business, Education, Science and Mathematics, Nursing and Health, and Ministry and Theology. That's a seriously focused lineup. You won't find dozens of degrees across every discipline, but what you'll find is real depth in the areas they do cover.

Nursing and education are the flagship programmes. These are fully accredited professional degrees with extensive clinical or education placement hours. Nursing students get clinical placements at Sydney Adventist Hospital, as well as other approved providers, and education students do multiple supervised placements in both Adventist and non-Adventist schools alike. These placements are core to the programme, central to how the university trains people, and they're a big part of that graduate employment figure. When you graduate from nursing or teaching with hundreds of hours of supervised practice from a specialist institution like Avondale, that simply speaks to certain types of employers, and a 97.7% employment rate is the obvious result.

The Sydney campus at Wahroonga deserves special attention if you're considering nursing. It's physically located within the Sydney Adventist Hospital precinct, which means your teaching happens just metres from actual wards and clinical environments. You have access to modern simulation rooms and hospital infrastructure, without having to travel all across the city to do a placement.

Counselling is a growing area. There's a Bachelor of Arts in Counselling, and importantly it's a Commonwealth supported place, which means the government is subsidising part of your tuition fees and you'll pay the lower HECS rate. For anyone interested in mental health as a career, this is really worth looking at seriously, particularly given the national workforce shortages we have in mental health, which are close to catastrophic. Australia needs to do better on mental health.

Ministry and theology are, unsurprisingly, areas of particular strength, given the university's identity. The programmes prepare graduates for roles in church leadership, chaplaincy, and community work, primarily but not exclusively within the Adventist network. If that's your calling, there are almost no places in Australia that offer this kind of integrated theological education within a university setting, and this could absolutely be your best option.

Research activity and the alumni network

On the research side, Avondale is not a research-intensive university and it doesn't pretend to be, but it does have genuine research activity in areas that align with its mission. The Lifestyle Research Centre does work on diet, physical activity, and chronic disease prevention, practical health research with real-world applications. There's the Christian Education Research Centre, which contributes to the understanding of how faith-based schools work and how they can improve. And the Scripture, Spirituality and Society Research Centre basically does what it says on the label. These aren't massive operations, but they're focused and they produce work that matters in their communities.

One thing that's easy to overlook is the alumni network. Avondale graduates are deeply embedded in Adventist schools, hospitals, and churches across Australia and in the South Pacific as well. Because it's such a niche institution, that is a real professional network, one you almost won't find elsewhere from an Australian university. If you're planning to work in those sectors, the connections you make at Avondale have real, concrete, unequivocal career value.

Performance data: student satisfaction and graduate employment

Here's where it gets really interesting, because Avondale's performance data tells a story that might genuinely surprise you. Some of these numbers will make you rethink what a tiny university is capable of delivering. This data comes from the Australian Government's QILT Survey, the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching, conducted by the Social Research Centre. I've got a whole session on QILT and the Quality Indicators website, which you can find in the session description. The data is independently collected, drawn from hundreds of thousands of students, and includes employer voice. You can trust this information.

In terms of student satisfaction, 89.7% from the QILT 2023 Student Experience Survey. To put that in perspective, the national average sits in the mid-to-high 70s. The University of Melbourne, Australia's top-ranked uni, comes in at 73.8%. Bond University, a much more expensive private, not-for-profit university on the Gold Coast, scores 88.3%. So Avondale is right there at the top. Why? Small classes, direct access to staff, a residential community where people actually get to know each other. It's not complicated. When you feel known, supported, and part of a community, you report higher student satisfaction. The data bears this out year after year for small institutions and regional institutions.

Graduate employment sits at 89.8% full-time, according to the Good Universities Guide cited by Avondale, compared to a national average of 75.4%. And in an earlier QILT Graduate Outcomes Survey, that number hit 97.7%, which is remarkable. Context matters here: Avondale graduates are overwhelmingly in nursing and education, two fields with strong workforce demand and structured pathways into employment. A nursing graduate in Australia right now is walking into a job market that is desperate for them. It's much the same story in teaching. So the employment figure partly reflects those disciplines, but even accounting for that, the numbers are outstanding.

Salary data isn't available in the standard rankings data set for Avondale, which is a limitation. But we do know that nursing and teaching graduates are going into award workplaces where salary rates are essentially controlled, organised, and negotiated by the unions, so salaries are largely going to be comparable to what graduates make from other universities in those fields.

On global rankings, Avondale doesn't appear in Times Higher Education or QS, and that's not a mark against it. Those rankings heavily weight things like research output, international student numbers, and international reputation surveys, which all favour larger, research-intensive universities. A university with 1,500 students was never going to compete on those measures, and it would be misleading to pretend otherwise. What Avondale does really well, teaching, student experience, and graduate employment, doesn't get picked up well by global rankings. That's a flaw in the rankings, not a flaw in the university.

Comparison universities to put on your shortlist

Finally, let's compare Avondale to some other institutions and see what else might make your shortlist. Geographically, the closest university to the main campus is the University of Newcastle, which has campuses in Newcastle itself but also on the Central Coast. It's a much bigger institution with a vast array of subjects, a bigger social scene, and very good rankings, particularly in engineering, medicine, and health sciences. If you want to stay on the Central Coast or in the Hunter but you're looking for scale and breadth, the University of Newcastle is a no-brainer. We have a session on that in the catalogue.

Looking at Avondale against Australia's other faith-based institutions, the University of Notre Dame Australia is possibly the closest direct match. It's also small, private, and Catholic rather than Adventist, with campuses in Sydney, Perth, and Broome. It values community and pastoral care and has strong programmes in nursing, education, and health, plus a solid business offering. If you want a faith-integrated experience but a different flavour, or you want to be in the heart of Sydney or Fremantle, Notre Dame is the natural comparison point. Its graduate employment is also fantastically strong, at 86.5%, well above the national average.

Another institution I would naturally compare Avondale against is the University of Divinity, a really interesting institution based largely around Melbourne that operates on a collegiate model. You end up in a religious college based around one of the Christian faiths. It's a fascinating place, with a very small number of enrolments and a real focus on the theology side of things. If theology is absolutely what you're looking for, the University of Divinity should be on your shortlist.

And once again, for the final comparison, there's Australian Catholic University. It's more like the University of Newcastle in the sense that it offers a wide range of subjects, but within the framework of the Catholic faith. ACU has campuses in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Canberra, with multiple locations in Sydney, so there are lots of opportunities to find your place within that network. It might be closer to home and allows you to study disciplines like education, nursing, and allied health, where it's absolutely excellent. It offers an excellent education with more of that traditional university experience compared to Avondale. I've got sessions on all of these as part of the virtual expo. You can find those down in the description below.

Questions from the audience

I'd like to take some questions, and we did have a couple come in advance. One specifically about Avondale, and one that's a nice sideways one.

First: Avondale is a faith-based university. Do I need to be Seventh-day Adventist? As I said in my presentation, no, you don't have to be Adventist to go to Avondale. But you will find those Christian values woven through the whole fabric of the place. You need to be comfortable with that religious environment and have it integrated into your whole experience. It's not for everybody, but for the people whom it resonates with, it's going to be exceptional.

The second one is a little bit sideways from that: I'm thinking of taking a gap year. Will unis look down on that? Absolutely not. I call them exploratory years, and they are wonderful opportunities to get experience, discover your interests, and honestly have a bit of time out before hitting university. Unis don't care about it. Some actually encourage it. What it opens up for you is a non-ATAR pathway into your degree. If you're coming straight out of school, it's about the ATAR, or perhaps about early entry if you're lucky enough to go through an early entry pathway. But for a lot of students who are getting close to a cut-off mark and may not get the marks they need, having a gap year puts you into a different pathway. Almost every university has alternative pathways for what we call mature-age students: basically being away from high school for a year or two makes you a mature student, and your journey into uni can be very different. In some ways it's actually an advantage. I'm a massive fan of gap years, of exploratory years, and of taking that time out before hitting your degree.

That's it for this session on Avondale. Thank you for joining me. Any questions or comments, make sure you hit me up in the Choosing Your Uni Discord. If you're a parent, you can do that in the Facebook community. I'll see you in the next video. Take care.