Welcome and introducing the Compare Ed resource

Good day and welcome to the National Virtual Expo. I'm your host, Rob Malicki. I'm so excited about today's session because for the last decade, as I've been doing YouTube videos at every Australian university, there's been one source of information that I have referenced every single time, and that's the Compare Ed website. It's literally one of your sources of truth when you are looking for a university experience.

Luckily for you today, our last day of the National Virtual Expo, we are going into detail about the Compare Ed website, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Liz Killen, who is a research director at the Social Research Centre. The Social Research Centre runs the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching survey suite, which is delivered for the Australian government. All of that sounds very technical, but what you need to know is that you can really easily access all of this great data on the Compare Ed website: compareED.edu.au. Details are in the session description below.

If you've got questions as we're going through this session, please feel free to drop them in the chat, whether you are watching on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or on the session hub. We'll try to get to them as part of this session. We do have a very full session, so if we don't get to them, I will answer every single question on the Choosing Your Uni Expo Discord. You can find a link in the session notes below.

Rob: Liz, great to have you here.

Guest: Lovely to chat to you, Rob. Looking forward to it.

Rob: As I said, I'm genuinely frothing like two beer cans that have been shaken up in the back of a ute about this session, because data and understanding how to make your choice and finding information that underpins that choice can be difficult. And Compare Ed is just such a great resource. But before we get to that, tell me about you. What's your story? How did you end up at the Social Research Centre?

Liz's path from regional New South Wales to chemical engineering

Guest: Thanks, Rob. My story is a bit of an indirect one. When I first went to university, I thought I wanted to study teaching. I was going to become a science teacher because I'm a bit of a nerd, Rob. I liked maths, I liked physics, I liked chemistry. I grew up in Tamworth, New South Wales, about six hours north of Sydney, and I thought I'd be a science teacher that uses all of those things. I got to university and actually changed after my first year into chemical engineering, which uses all of the same skills. I came to the Social Research Centre having worked first as a chemical engineer, then moving into government in science policy roles. And now I'm here working on education policy and these fantastic resources, which are the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching surveys. All of that great data gets put into Compare Ed for students to use.

Rob: Before we get to Compare Ed, can I ask a few more questions about that? I think there's some stuff in there that'll really help the audience making their choice. You moved from regional New South Wales to study somewhere else. Where did you go?

Guest: I moved to Sydney to study at UNSW, which was a great move. I really enjoyed it. I stayed at one of the residential colleges on campus, Basser College, which still exists. I think they've got a new building now, a bit flasher, but it was a great experience and it really meant I got to meet a lot of people from really different degrees who are still lifelong friends more than a decade later. So it was a really good experience.

Rob: The other thing I picked up on is that you changed direction, and I think a lot of people have a fear of changing direction. Can you tell me about that choice to change?

Guest: Absolutely, and I think this is something I didn't really know about before I went. A lot of degrees have a foundation first year where you really have to cover some basics. I was doing science teaching, but the engineers were doing almost exactly the same first-year subjects. I was doing maths, physics, chemistry, and an education subject, and the engineers were doing maths, physics, chemistry, and an engineering subject. When I got to the end of my first year, I talked to some friends and realised that my interests were a bit more aligned with the engineering side of things. Once I knew what it was, I was able to just transfer across, and I didn't even lose any time in my degree because I'd already done basically the same subjects. The education subject I'd done counted as an elective, and I could catch up that first-year engineering subject later.

The thing I say now, having had that experience, is: as long as you are vaguely in the right area, you are able to have that bit of flexibility, particularly in the sciences and engineering, but also in other degrees. Changing majors in the arts and humanities is more possible than people think. I knew quite a few people who did it.

Rob: It's so true. I hear a lot of discussion about uni being expensive and HECS debt and all that kind of stuff, and my argument is: yeah, you have to invest in this. But there is no greater opportunity in your life to explore so many different fields of study than at university. In the end, you're better off to spend a year, and whatever that costs, figuring that out, than living your whole life and becoming that 60-year-old who's sitting there thinking, maybe I actually went and did the wrong thing at university and ended up in a career I hate. If you could say, "I'm going to make you pay ten grand, but at the end of it you'll figure out exactly what you want" — where do I sign? End rant.

Guest: Absolutely. It's such an important time. Once you get to university, you figure it out a lot more, because all of a sudden you get exposed to all these different people and different career paths that you didn't actually know existed. Sometimes you can't even get to the point where you can make that decision until you're there, engaging with all these different people and ideas. You didn't know they existed, so you've got to discover that somewhere, and uni is the place.

What Compare Ed shows you and how to use it

Rob: Let's talk about the humans who are watching this session and how they should go about choosing their university.

Guest: Everyone has a different priority when they're choosing their university. Some people are looking at what other students thought of the university. Some are looking at how prestigious it is. Some want to know they've got the exact course they want to study. Some are thinking about affordability, or whether they can move for university or need to stay in their hometown. There are so many different ways people approach it.

Some of the things that are really important but probably get a little bit less airtime are: how much do other students enjoy their degree, and do graduates from these universities actually get jobs? Are they being employed when they finish? Most people don't really think about that as much, because they don't know that this data is out there to tell them exactly that — which is what Compare Ed does. The other one I love is what do employers think about graduates from these particular universities and fields of study? Because ultimately, if you end up in a job, you want that employer to think you've got the skills and experience to do it. You can get that information before you start a particular degree and understand whether employers value the skills that degree produces. I think that's a remarkable insight.

Rob: So maybe tell us about the Compare Ed website, and then for the data nerds out there we can talk about some of the underlying research. But let's start by delivering some value for people watching along. Let's talk about the website and how it works.

Guest: The Compare Ed website is really designed to help people compare different courses. You can see what other students thought about their overall experience at a university, what they thought about the teaching, how they felt about their interactions with other students, what they thought about the facilities and resources. And it's not just that — you can also see, after they finished their degree, did they rate their course, did they get a job, did they get a full-time job, how much were they paid, and how satisfied their employers were with their skills. There is such great information here. The best thing is you can compare between different universities and between different study areas.

The way we get all that data is by running surveys for the Australian government. The Department of Education wants to make sure students have access to this information, so they survey every single student at an Australian university or non-university higher education organisation, every year. They then come back when those students have finished their degree, about six months out of uni in their first job, and survey them again. And they don't just survey those graduates — they survey their employers as well. So you get this fantastic picture of how students feel during their degree and how they succeed afterwards. It's just such a valuable source of information.

Rob: Should we share the screen and have a look?

Guest: Let's do that. Yes.

Rob: And as you do that, I just want to ask a personal question. As a social researcher, this must be like a gold mine of data. You must get really excited about the level of depth you can get to from these survey responses.

Guest: Absolutely. For me it's about how accessible it is to everyone, because it doesn't help if the information is buried in an Excel table on some report website. This is really usable. It is right in front of you, and I think that's one of the best things about it.

Filtering by state, institution type, and student satisfaction

Rob: Awesome. Let's dive in. What are we looking at here, Liz?

Guest: This is the front end of the Compare Ed website, designed to help people compare different courses. Should I give you a test run? I'll use my own example because this didn't exist when I was looking at university, but if it had — I was initially looking to study education, so I might have looked up teacher education. Here's the study area. You can see there are a couple of other options if you're looking for something more specific, but I'll just pick teacher education. You can see that shows me 60 institutions, and there's already a bit of data here.

Because I was from Tamworth, New South Wales, maybe I'm going to filter my results. I'll filter to only look at New South Wales institutions and only universities. If I put those filters on, I can see I've got 19 different institutions and I can go through and compare them. If I'm looking for a university and I don't have any preconceptions, I don't know where I want to start, maybe I'll look at this smiley face here, which is the percentage of students that had an overall positive experience. Next to it you've got positive about their skills development, and then whether or not they found full-time employment at the end. So maybe I want to look for universities that had a really high positive overall experience — say over 80% — and I can add universities to my list from there.

Rob: As you go through that, the top one there is probably a great example. Avondale University — I'd almost guarantee most people have never heard of Avondale. It's a small institution just outside Sydney, but its student satisfaction results are consistently outstanding. A perfect example: you never would have even heard of this institution, and there it is right in front of you. And the statistic doesn't lie. What's critical, viewers, is that this is not talking about the whole university — this is talking about teaching and education specifically. That's the number. You've got to look for the data that actually lines up with you. If a uni doesn't have awesome student satisfaction overall but in your niche area it does really well, that's what counts.

Guest: Absolutely. Universities specialise. Some are better at different degrees. Some have a really good reputation for certain areas or certain professions. So it's fantastic to be able to get down to that level.

Once you've got however many universities you want to compare, there's a button at the top where you can see them all side by side. So I can compare those universities in teacher education on a whole bunch of things. It's not just that positive overall experience I selected for — I can then dig down into skills development, how students felt about their skills being developed, what they thought about the teaching, so much more. And obviously I still have to go and look at other things: where the university is, whether it has scholarships, all of those sorts of things. You still have to do some more research, but there's so much here to start you off with a short list.

Rob: Actually, this third column, Notre Dame — just another good example. The stat around skills development is around 87%. Notre Dame is also a small institution that a lot of people won't have heard of, but for education on a national level it does extraordinarily well. You look at one statistic and it's outperforming some more major institutions like Charles Sturt and the University of Wollongong. Does that mean you should go to that university? No, but it's good to know. It's good to feed that in.

Guest: And you have to think about what's important for you. What's the most important thing about your university experience? Is it going to be the teaching? Is it going to be your career afterwards? You have to figure out what matters most to you, and then you'll know how you want to compare those things.

Rob: Ninety per cent of University of Wollongong students were happy with their facilities. Anything over 90% is like — nine out of ten people super happy with whatever criteria you're looking at is an extraordinary result. Really anything over 80% is very strong. That's a very broad statement, but it holds up. And just to pick up on something you mentioned about researching more qualitative stuff like living experience and scholarships: that's why we built the Choosing Your Uni platform, which lets you interact with an AI chat agent to draw out those kinds of details without having to visit a million different websites. So you use a website like this to dive into the data, and then you use something like Choosing Your Uni to ask questions like, "I want to live in a residential college — which of these universities have residential colleges? Tell me about that." You don't have to go to ten different sites.

Guest: That's so good. The technology and resources available for students now is like nothing that ever existed before.

Graduate employment, starting salaries, and myth-busting the pay gap

Rob: Can we have a look at some of the employment data? Because I get asked about this a lot. People get a brochure from a uni, and on the back it says "rated five stars for blah blah blah" and "highest starting salaries in the country for X, Y, Z." And I'm thinking: this is the marketing, right? There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Pick the statistic that matches your message. Universities, like every organisation, do the same. You need to take that stuff with a grain of salt. Graduate data, starting salaries, employment rates — it's the same. Can we have a look at those?

Guest: Definitely. I'll use my own experience again in terms of starting salary and employment satisfaction. I went to UNSW, and I started off in teacher education, so I'll add that to Compare Ed. Because the other thing you can do is compare not just between institutions but also between degrees. I then changed into chemical engineering — here, part of engineering — so I can actually compare those two degrees at my same university. If you're not sure exactly what you want to study, this is a really great comparison to have.

We just looked at current student experience, but let's look at recent graduate employment and salary. If I look at how many found full-time employment, it's basically the same for both degrees. From engineering and from education, both have really high full-time employment rates. You can see the national average is just below the main statistics, so they're both above it — over 90% found employment after finishing their degree. And then you've got median salary, which is, surprisingly, the same. Exactly the same.

Rob: I think people would be shocked by that, honestly — thinking that a teacher is getting paid the same as an engineer starting out. Of course over time those might diverge, and that's where more research is required if money is important to you. We all need money to live, of course. But to what extent that drives you is a question only you can answer. Even people trying to give you advice — your parents, your friends, your grandma, your dog if your dog's a good listener — everyone will have an opinion. But only you truly know you. So when you look at something like that, it should give you a feeling about whether or not it means something to you. Listen to that feeling, is my advice.

Guest: I absolutely agree. One of the things I really appreciate about this data is having a way to sense-check things, because sometimes I got some good advice from teachers, friends, and family, but some of it was a bit outdated — reflecting how things were 10 or 20 years ago. Whereas this data has been collected in the last couple of years. It's up to date, it reflects what's happening now in the education market and how universities are working today. So that's really valuable even just as a sense check. There's still really good advice from people who know you well, but at the end of the day it's up to you to think about what's important and what you want to prioritise in your career.

Comparing institutions overall before narrowing down by course

Rob: I talk about Compare Ed all the time, but I think a lot of people aren't aware of this resource. How can we get it into more hands, Liz?

Guest: We've just got to share it amongst our friends, our family, and people we know in their last years of high school who are choosing what they want to do. We need careers advisors to be recommending it to their students, because this is such a valuable public resource that the government has put together. It is a treasure trove for people to use. Rob, thank you for sharing it. We're really grateful that you use Compare Ed so much and plug the data, because it makes a difference.

Rob: I'm a noisy advocate. Earlier in the expo I did a session on getting started on choosing your uni and your degree. If you haven't watched that yet and you're literally starting from scratch, that's a great place to begin, because I start from: you have no idea where to start, here are some of the tools you can use to orient yourself towards a field of study and then a degree. That starts by using tools like Choosing Your Uni, and others that help identify your attributes and line you up with potential fields of study. From there you start to look at potential universities. And then Compare Ed is that critical tool as you're saying, "Okay, if I'm choosing between engineering and teaching, what does that mean in terms of graduates, specifically at particular institutions?" Once again, just because a uni has one stat doesn't mean you should or shouldn't go there, but knowledge is power. This is an absolutely critical step in the whole journey to uni, in my view.

Guest: Absolutely. Actually, one thing about Compare Ed I haven't shown you yet is that you can compare institutions overall as well. If you're not sure where you want to go or what you want to do, you can look at all the different institutions before you drill down into your specific degree. So let's say I could live in Sydney and I compare some Sydney universities — Western Sydney University, University of Sydney, UNSW. There are other universities in Sydney but I'll just pick those for now. I can compare them and look at the universities overall and say: is there any real difference in terms of student experience before I start narrowing things down? Maybe you've got ten universities you could attend and you only want to go to three or four open days. You don't have all the time in the world. So you can compare between different universities overall if you're still not sure where you want to go or what you might want to do, which I think is really fantastic.

Rob: As you're scrolling there, I'm always looking for the exceptions. You might be comparing four or five different things at once, scrolling down, and thinking: okay, these are all more or less the same. Good to know, this is bang on average. But then suddenly you've got an 81 that kind of stands out. What's that? You can then ask: well, what is this criteria I'm looking at, and is it relevant to me? You don't need to spend hours trolling through every line. People like us, Liz, actually do that, but some people just want the nuggets. It's pretty easy to get the nuggets. You scroll through, you look for numbers that look significantly higher or lower than the others, and you can say: oh, this uni is really low on student satisfaction. My question is always: why? There are some classic examples. Some of the big famous Australian universities that rank in the global top rankings perform incredibly poorly on student satisfaction in Australia, or are among the lowest. My question then isn't "I shouldn't go there." The question is why. Why does a massive Group of Eight institution that's world-famous perform badly on student satisfaction? The answer is sometimes: they teach a vast range of subjects, so satisfaction varies by subject area. Or the institution is so huge that you have to be a lot more proactive — you haven't got the hand-holding support of a small or regional institution. So if you are a student who needs more support to get through your degree, a massive university probably isn't the best choice for you. Don't just look at a stat and say, "It's better, therefore that's for me." Think about why it is better and what that means for you. Is it better, and is it better for you?

Guest: That's a lot of thinking. But yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? One of the things I love is looking at what the graduates think after they've finished as well. You've got the current student experience, and you can see they're all similar, but Western Sydney is a little bit lower during the degree. Then at recent graduate satisfaction, the picture changes — it's a little bit higher. So it is really interesting to think about what different people see at different points of their degree: when they're doing it, and once they finish.

Why global university rankings matter less than you think

Rob: Can I take one more step? For people who really want to dive into the detail, the Compare Ed website is a fantastic place, super easy to use. There is another level you can go to if you really want detail, detail, detail, and that's the actual QILT data itself, which is publicly available. Could you talk briefly about the QILT datasets and where people might find them? That's going to be too deep for 90% of people watching, but for some people who really want to explore, QILT is literally the gold mine.

Guest: QILT is absolutely fantastic. We have four different surveys in QILT. If you want to dig into any particular point in the student life cycle: we've got the Student Experience Survey, which covers your time during your degree; we've got the Graduate Outcomes Survey, which is four to six months after you finish a course; we then survey the employers of those graduates — not to rate the graduate, but to get a picture of what employers across Australia think about whether universities are producing graduates with the right skills for industry; and then we follow up again three years later with the Graduate Outcomes Survey Longitudinal. They're all available on the QILT website if this is the sort of thing you want to dig into.

Rob: I think this is careers advisor territory, and maybe for parents who are data people and want to spend some time in the detail. The level of detail is quite extraordinary. So here we are on the QILT website — it's QILT.edu.au, isn't it?

Guest: QILT — Q-I-L-T.

Rob: There is a "you" in QILT, because it's all about you. Someone should trademark that.

Guest: Oh, that's good. We need to use that.

Rob: I am a father, so I'm allowed to tell dad jokes. So here on the QILT website, you can see this is the level of data going into the Compare Ed website. We had over 158,000 undergraduate students and 99,000 postgraduate students complete the last survey. So when you're looking at Compare Ed, the data you're getting is good. And then for careers advisors, there are online tables where you can look at the most recent reports — student learning experience by university — and you can cut this data all sorts of ways. You can see confidence intervals, drill down by different universities, by peer engagement, skills development. There's all sorts of ways to cut this data, and it's all on the website, really user-friendly.

Guest: And actually, look at this one: international student experience by country. If you're coming to Australia from overseas, there's literally data you can look at about that. So this is — if you are coming to Australia for university from one of these countries, you can see what students from that country thought about their experience. Did they improve their English skills? What was their work experience like? How was their personal safety on campus? It's really great to see how high those figures are. Such a fantastic resource for international students to look at Australian universities.

Rob: Incredible. So QILT.edu.au is where you'll find that level of magic. Now I want to talk very briefly about global rankings. Global rankings, folks — you'll see lots of global rankings data, and universities will really flash that around on the top level because it looks really good: "We are university X in the world, we're in the top percentages of unis in the world." All of that's interesting, but it's more marketing speak, right? The big international rankings are based on stuff that might not actually be relevant to you. A lot of those rankings lean very heavily into research output — how much research universities are generating. That's not relevant to you if you're going to become a teacher.

The big rankings are constructed very differently to what we're looking at here. This is real data that's come from human beings who have actually studied at these places. It's run for the Australian government via an independent organisation. This, to me, is high-confidence data. I really trust what I see coming from QILT and through Compare Ed. It's not that I don't trust the data from those global rankings — I'm just more sceptical about how relevant it is to a course choice. There are a few exceptions: if you're looking at things like social impact, where you're starting to get down to specific questions, maybe that's more relevant. But those big global top-ranking numbers — I just don't think they're that important compared to what we've been looking at today. Personal opinion.

Guest: No, I think you're right. The Compare Ed data is what I would be looking at if I were a student coming into a university, and I know there's really high trust in it. There are hundreds of thousands of students responding, giving you a really great picture across universities at the course level. Our methods are published online — it's really transparent, really high quality. This is the data I would be using if I was going to university for the first time.

Rob: Me too. There we go.

Applying to Cambridge — and how data gave Liz the confidence to try

Rob: Maybe we finish on this. You've done what's called a doctorate. For those not familiar, it's the top level of academic study. You typically do an undergraduate degree, then perhaps a master's, and then a doctorate or PhD. And you did yours at the University of Cambridge. That's pretty cool.

Guest: It sounds quite good, doesn't it? It was a pretty fantastic experience, but I never would've done it if it weren't for my sister. She is such a clever cookie. She was doing research work after she finished her undergraduate degree from the University of Wollongong — doing Alzheimer's research — and she wasn't sure whether she wanted to do a PhD either way. So she thought: I'll just apply for one. And she thought, if I'm just applying for one, I'll apply for the best one in the world for what she was doing. She did that, and she got in, and she got a fantastic Universities Australia scholarship to go over there. Such a clever cookie.

She's a data person as well, so she called me one day and said: "Do you know that the odds for Australians who apply to do a postgrad at Cambridge are pretty good? They actually publish these." I never would've applied, Rob, because it just felt so out of reach for someone in Australia to go somewhere like Cambridge. And she said: "Look, I've looked at the data. Of all the Australians that apply for a postgrad, one in two get in and one in three start their course." Those odds — I'm a data person, so I thought: I'll go for those odds. That's worth a crack. And that's how I ended up at Cambridge.

Rob: Just needs to run faster than the next person, right? Don't need to swim faster than the shark, just need to swim faster than the person next to you.

Guest: That's a good way to put it. And I think this is the thing about data, isn't it? If I had never heard that, I probably wouldn't have applied and life would've been different. Full credit to my sister — she was a guiding light.

Rob: Love it. And in terms of the experience itself — we've done a session on studying your degree overseas, and a session on going on exchange as part of your degree. What's it like to study at a place like Cambridge? It's got so much history.

Guest: It does. It was really special. The thing that really got me was walking into my college through these big doors in this old brick building — and it was actually older than Machu Picchu, this building we were using every day. The porters, the people who let you in and out and kept your mail, were sitting at the front of a building that old. It's such an interesting place where you've got that living history, all these things still being used. You could cycle everywhere. It was a really beautiful environment to be in.

I definitely recommend an exchange as well. During my degree I did an exchange to the University of California, Santa Barbara. I've still got friends from that exchange. We still have a book club every couple of months, and they're all over the world now — Singapore, the UK, the US, all doing incredible things. So if it's possible and doable for you, I'd definitely recommend considering an exchange. It's a lot of paperwork, but it's worth it.

Final advice for students choosing their path

Rob: This is one of our last sessions of the Virtual Expo. Just to reference a couple of others that tie into what Liz has been talking about: there's a whole session on doing an exchange or an international study experience as part of your degree. There's also a great session I recorded with Thomas Beltram that talks about the whole journey through uni — from bachelor's through to master's to doctorate — so you understand what that entire journey could look like if you're in for a ten-plus-year expedition to the academic peak. Liz, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me at the National Virtual Expo. Any last thoughts for people thinking about going to uni, or their parents and supporters watching along?

Guest: Just good luck. Enjoy it. It is a great time of your life and such an incredible period for development. Even if you're not sure what you want to do, my main thought is: you don't need to know exactly what you want to do in your degree or in your career right now. Find an area that's about right, that has most of the things you want, that interests you. From there you can find your niche, you can find your career, you can find your interests. And as we said, Rob, even if you get there and find it's not quite for you — even if you were completely set on something — you can change. Don't feel like you're having to make the final decision now. You are moving towards something. Just keep moving in the right direction and you'll find what works for you.

Rob: That is so spot on. My final thought is that young people hear a lot: "You've got to find your passion and follow your passion." I actually think we need to flip that narrative around. Most people in life become passionate about something because they've been doing it for a period of time. As they get more experience and niche down into different areas, they find that thing — the passion grows on them. It's not something you find first and then pursue. It's the movement, the motion, that actually creates the enthusiasm, the passion for something. So anyone who tells you to just find your passion is actually wrong. Your passion will find you eventually, as long as you're always moving and choosing.

Rob: Liz, thank you so much for joining me. My guest has been Dr. Liz Killen, research director at the Social Research Centre, who runs the phenomenal QILT survey suite for the Australian government. We've been talking about the Compare Ed website — compareED.edu.au — which you must use. Thanks so much for joining me at the National Virtual Expo in this session. All of the recordings are available on demand at expo.choosingauni.com/sessions. If you've got any questions about what we've talked about, or about which institution or degree might suit you, jump into the Choosing Your Uni Discord for independent thoughts from the community. And if you're a parent, we have a whole Facebook community just for you. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm Rob Malicki.