Welcome and what this session covers

G'day, and welcome to the Choosing Your Uni National Virtual Expo. I'm your host, Rob Malicki. Welcome to this session on La Trobe University. Before we kick off, I'd like to acknowledge the land on which I'm living and working, and I'd like to acknowledge traditional custodians all throughout history. Really appreciate it.

For those people joining me live, thanks so much for being here. You can participate by dropping your questions into the chat, regardless of whether you're on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or on the Expo hub. Drop your questions in and I'll do my best to get to them in this session. If you're watching on the replay, you can ask your questions in the Choosing Your Uni Discord, and you can find the link to that in the session details below. If you're a parent, we have a Facebook community which is there to help you answer questions about how to support your student on their journey to university.

So here's what's going on in the next 20 minutes or so. We're going to be talking about what La Trobe is really well known for, who would be well-suited to studying there, and we're going to hear from some students talking about their experience. Then we're going to be talking about academic strengths and the data of going to university: student satisfaction, graduate employment rates, starting salaries. We're going to dig into the data, look at those details, and I'm going to help you unpack which of those statistics is actually important to you. We're going to go behind the marketing hype to help you understand which of those numbers matters in making your decision. And at the end of the session, I'm going to go through which Australian universities I would compare La Trobe against if I were trying to make that decision, to help you prepare your shortlist.

Who La Trobe is for, and who might look elsewhere

Let me give you a surprising statistic. La Trobe University is ranked first in Victoria and third in all of Australia for employer satisfaction. Not student satisfaction. Employer satisfaction. The people who do the hiring. La Trobe graduates rate higher than almost every other university in the country. That's a number really worth paying attention to, and we're going to dig into it a little bit later in this session.

So who is La Trobe actually for, and who should possibly look elsewhere? Firstly, La Trobe possibly isn't for you if you're chasing above everything else the prestige factor. La Trobe isn't one of the Group of Eight universities. The Group of Eight is a coalition of Australia's top research-intensive universities: unis like the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the University of Sydney, the University of Western Australia. If having that kind of brand name on your degree is your number one priority, then La Trobe probably isn't your place.

It's also probably not for you if you're really looking for that buzzy inner-city environment where there's life happening 24/7. La Trobe's main campus is in Bundoora, in Melbourne's north. It's quite a hike out from the city centre. What's absolutely amazing about it is that it's a huge parkland campus with lakes and a wildlife sanctuary. It's absolutely beautiful and chilled and relaxed, but it ain't the city centre.

And if you have zero interest in things like health, allied health, agriculture, or sports science, you may miss out on a lot of what makes this place distinctive. Those are the areas where La Trobe genuinely punches above its weight. Even if you're doing other traditional subjects like business and law, there's still a way to infuse your experience at uni with those subject areas where La Trobe is strong. Health businesses, sports businesses, and other organisations still need those other skill sets around the periphery. So that doesn't mean you shouldn't go to La Trobe. It's just something to consider in the context of what you're hoping to achieve.

Student voices: what it's like to study at La Trobe

When you're choosing a university, you probably want to hear from people who've actually studied there. Here's a clip from students who studied at La Trobe, so you can hear about their individual experience.

"What do you want to study here?" "I'm studying health sciences, physiology. I'm doing a Bachelor of Biomedicine." "Nice. Is it a good course?" "It's actually pretty good. La Trobe is, yeah, definitely." "And what's it like studying here? What's the atmosphere like?" "Pretty chill. You just walk to class, you come out, you wait for your next one. Good class, do your thing." "Are people pretty approachable? I talk to a lot of high school students who come straight out of high school, never been to uni before. What's it like meeting people and making friends?" "It's definitely much easier than high school. Honestly, you can talk to anyone here and they'll be really nice."

Three things that make La Trobe genuinely stand out

Here are three things that make La Trobe genuinely stand out as an institution.

First, in the health and allied health disciplines, La Trobe is genuinely outstanding. Nursing at La Trobe is ranked in the top 30 globally, not top 30 in Australia, the top 30 globally. In sport and exercise science it's in the global top 50. These aren't just strong departments; they are among the very best on the planet in their fields. So if you want to study things like physiotherapy, podiatry medicine, speech pathology, podiatry, dentistry, or nursing, La Trobe should be on your shortlist, full stop. Many of these programs include clinical placements from early in the degree, so you're not just learning theory in the classroom. You're in real clinics working with real patients. La Trobe actually runs public clinics on campus in areas like physiotherapy, psychology, podiatry, and speech pathology, which is a service to the community, but also gives students hands-on training. If you're thinking about healthcare, I'd also be looking at the Australian Catholic University, which has similar strengths in nursing and health, as well as some of the regional universities, which I'll come to later.

Secondly, one of the things that stands out to me about La Trobe is the fact that it genuinely straddles metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria. The main campus is in Bundoora, on the outskirts of Melbourne. But La Trobe also has campuses in Bendigo, Albury-Wodonga on the New South Wales border, Mildura, and Shepparton. That's not just a token presence. What it tells you is that La Trobe is serious about the regions. The La Trobe Rural Health School trains health and education professionals for regional communities. So if you're from regional Victoria or you want to work in a regional health or education setting after you graduate, this is a university that understands that world in a way that many metro universities might talk about but don't necessarily have the footprint for. The other great thing about living out in the regions is the cost of living. Melbourne is really expensive, and you can save literally a couple of hundred dollars a week by living, studying, and working in regional Victoria.

Third, La Trobe has a strong identity around social inclusion and access. It was founded in 1964 as Victoria's third university, partly to serve students who didn't fit the mould of the older sandstone institutions, and that DNA persists. There's a genuine emphasis on first-in-family students, students from Melbourne's northern suburbs, and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Their scholarship programmes reflect this, with equity scholarships sitting alongside merit-based awards.

La Trobe's academic strengths across disciplines

La Trobe organises its teaching through ten schools covering a wide range of disciplines. The big enrolment clusters, where most students are studying and honestly where the university invests most heavily, are health and allied health, the life sciences, agriculture, business, education, the social sciences, and nursing and midwifery.

In nursing and midwifery, La Trobe is a national leader. The School of Nursing and Midwifery has deep clinical placement networks with hospitals and health services across all of Victoria, and students get access to real clinical environments from early in their degrees. If you combine that with the allied health programmes for occupational therapy and the like, you've got one of the most comprehensive health training ecosystems at any Australian university.

Sport and exercise science is another standout, with La Trobe ranking in the global top 50 in this area. The expanded La Trobe Sports Park on the Bundoora campus gives students access to high-quality training and research facilities. So if a career in sports science, sport management, or exercise physiology appeals to you, this is one of the strongest places in the country to study it.

Agriculture and food science is also an area where La Trobe is investing heavily and punching above its weight. Food security is becoming increasingly important, and the La Trobe Institute of Sustainable Agriculture and Food, which they call LISAF, focuses on food security, sustainable farming, and plant science. There's a major glasshouse complex on the Bundoora campus for advanced agricultural research, and the university is building a bio-innovation precinct in partnership with private biotech companies and the Victorian Government. That includes a clinical-scale mRNA manufacturing facility. mRNA, as you may remember, is one of the technologies that led to the Covid vaccines. Having that manufacturing infrastructure is absolutely critical for Australia's capability, and La Trobe is involved in that. This isn't just theoretical research sitting in a journal; it's actual infrastructure that connects directly to industry.

On the technology side of things, La Trobe has established an Australian Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Medical Innovation, as well as a digital innovation hub built in conjunction with Cisco and Optus. So if you're interested in how AI and data are being applied to real-world problems, La Trobe is investing in this space.

Looking beyond health and science, La Trobe has genuine strengths in areas like archaeology, sociology, and psychology, all of which appear in the global subject rankings. The humanities and social sciences at La Trobe aren't just filler programmes. Law and criminology are also extremely well regarded, and criminology in particular benefits from La Trobe's broader strengths in social science research.

One more thing worth mentioning is work-integrated learning, which runs through a lot of programmes at La Trobe: clinical placements in health, school-based practical placements in education, and industry projects in business and technology. This isn't a university where you just sit in lectures for three years and then suddenly try to find a job without any experience. Applied learning is definitely part of the model.

More student perspectives on campus life

"The La Trobe campus itself, it's huge. It's pretty big and it's pretty nice. Huge and spacious." "If you're new here at La Trobe, where do people hang out? Is there a place to go?" "The library is actually sort of the hub of this place. Everyone just goes to the library and then when they've got classes they go to their classes. There's space around there where you can sit and talk to your friends, but primarily it's the library."

Graduate outcomes and student satisfaction data

Let's get to the numbers. There are some genuinely interesting patterns in La Trobe's data, and one metric in particular might surprise you. This data comes from the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching from the Australian Government, a national survey system that tracks student experience and graduate outcomes from every Australian university.

Let's start with student satisfaction. La Trobe sits at 73.8%. That's actually below the national average, and it's on the lower side for comparable institutions as well. For comparison, Deakin sits at 81.1% and Swinburne at 78%, both of which are Melbourne universities that score meaningfully higher. Does that mean students hate La Trobe? No. But it does mean there's room for improvement in the day-to-day student experience, and it's definitely something to ask about if you visit an open day. Teaching quality also tracks in a similar range.

It's worth noting that satisfaction scores can be shaped by things like campus size, survey response patterns, and how well expectations are managed upfront. A big campus with a diverse student body can sometimes produce lower satisfaction scores than a small, tightly focused university. That plays out across major institutions: even the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney have below-average student satisfaction scores, partly because they're training wide ranges of students across many different disciplines.

Graduate employment sits at 78.5% of students in full-time work four months after graduating. That's a solid result, about in the middle of the pack for Australian universities. It's not the highest in Melbourne, which is Monash at 82%, and it's above RMIT at 71%, so it sits comfortably between the two. And remember that employer satisfaction figure I mentioned right at the start: first in Victoria and third highest in Australia. The HR managers and businesses doing the hiring rank La Trobe graduates highly. To me that's a compelling figure, because it means La Trobe is recognised as producing really good, competent graduates. And in the end, isn't that what you're looking for?

The median starting salary at La Trobe is $69,400. That's slightly below the national median for comparable universities. Part of what drives that is the discipline mix: La Trobe has large cohorts in education, arts, and social sciences, which tend to produce lower starting salaries than fields like engineering and mining. That doesn't mean those graduates are less valuable; it just means the salary figure reflects the fields of study students are choosing. And remember, these are graduate starting salaries, not the salary you're going to end up with for the rest of your life. I always take those starting salary figures with a grain of salt.

Global rankings and how to interpret them

Global rankings get a lot of attention, and universities love to wave them around because Australian universities do perform very well on a global scale. La Trobe sits at 233rd in the QS World University Rankings and in a similar position on the Times Higher Education ranking, around 250th to 300th in the world. That places it at number 17 in Australia and comfortably within the top 1% of universities worldwide, which is an amazing result.

Rankings do, however, measure things like research output and reputation quite heavily, so they don't necessarily measure how well you'll be taught or how happy you'll be. They do tell you how research-active an institution is and how internationally recognised it is. The big universities with lots of research and huge international reputations tend to score more highly on these rankings.

The easiest way to break down and interpret all of these numbers and work out which ones are relevant to you is either via the Compared website, compareED.edu.au, or on the Choosing Your Uni community platform. You can simply ask to compare La Trobe with any other institution on key metrics without having to go searching and looking things up. Our AI agent will surface that information for you pretty much instantly, saving you a lot of time.

Which universities to compare La Trobe against

This is one of my favourite parts of these sessions: comparing which institutions I would look at if I was also considering La Trobe University.

The first is a geographic one, particularly if you're in Melbourne. RMIT is the other large non-Group-of-Eight university that draws heavily from Melbourne's north and west. It does also have a campus at Bundoora, teaching a fairly substantial range of subjects. However, RMIT's main campus is right in the heart of Melbourne, which is very different to La Trobe's location. The vibe is completely different: design- and technology-focused with real urban energy. So depending on what you're looking to study, that's an interesting comparison point. Same city, very different experience.

Second, Deakin University shares a lot of La Trobe's DNA. It's a post-1960s Victorian university, strong in health and education, with both metropolitan and regional campuses. However, Deakin consistently outperforms La Trobe on student satisfaction, scoring 81.1% versus La Trobe's 73.8%. If student experience is a top priority for you, that gap is definitely worth investigating.

Victoria University is another institution in Victoria with similar DNA, very focused on equity, access, and social engagement, and servicing that first-in-family, lower-socioeconomic demographic. It's geographically located in a very different part of Melbourne to La Trobe, but offers similar strengths across areas like health and sports science.

Now, let me throw you a curveball. Because of La Trobe's mix of metropolitan presence and regional footprint, I'd also consider looking at some of Australia's regional universities. I would look at the University of Southern Queensland, the University of New England (which has very strong health sciences in regional New South Wales), Southern Cross University (which has a presence on the Gold Coast as well as regional campuses and a similar DNA to La Trobe in some ways), and Charles Sturt University in New South Wales. There are a number of institutions you could use as comparison points, and we've got sessions on all of them as part of the National Virtual Expo.

Audience questions

I've got just a moment to answer a couple of pre-submitted questions. Aaron from Bendigo asks: La Trobe has campuses in regional Victoria as well as Bundoora. Are regional campus students treated as second class compared to the Melbourne ones? No. Definitely not. La Trobe takes its regional mission incredibly seriously. Not every degree is offered on every campus, so you do want to look into those details. But that regional footprint is critical to La Trobe University, and you will be just as valued as a student at any of those campuses as you would be at the Melbourne campus.

Someone also asked: how much should I factor in uni rankings in my decision? Rankings are worth looking at, but you really need to look into the detail. How La Trobe performs in health isn't the same as how it performs in business. Just looking at a top-line figure like "ranked 200th to 300th in the world" doesn't tell the full story. Don't believe the marketing hype. Do your research, either on Compared or on the Choosing Your Uni website, where you can just ask your questions chat-style and get the answers that are relevant to you.

That's all we've got time for in this session. Sorry if I haven't gotten to your individual questions in the various chats, but I will be in the Discord shortly to answer those. I look forward to seeing you during some of the other sessions at the National Virtual Expo. Thanks so much for joining me. Have yourself an awesome day. I'm Rob Malicki.