Senate committee to probe ‘failed promise’ of higher education

A parliamentary committee has been ordered to investigate the personal toll of university education that drives Australian graduates to the brink of suicide as they endure the “humiliation ritual” of job-seeking in the age of artificial intelligence.

A near deserted Senate has approved a motion by Labor Party defector Fatima Payman to refer an inquiry into graduate unemployment to the Senate’s Education and Employment References Committee.

The probe will investigate the entry-level job market and its “economic, social and psychological” impacts on graduates. The committee will also scrutinise the quality of Australian university education, whether graduates are “being taught the skills that employers are looking for” and “the state of affairs in comparable jurisdictions”.

The committee has been given until 20 November to lodge its report. It seems unlikely to reject the assignment, particularly given that is chaired by a senator from the opposition Liberal Party.

Payman, an independent senator who left Labor in a dispute over the Gaza war, said years of “recycled lectures and dead silent Zoom classes” left university graduates in a perilous position. Time out of the workforce increased their risk of never securing paid employment or of landing work “hopelessly misaligned” with what they had learnt.

“The young people who go to university did what they were told…study hard, and you’ll be rewarded for that hard work,” Payman told parliament. “The promise that was made to them was not kept.”

She cited research findings that 26 per cent of graduates in 2024 had failed to obtain full-time work within six months – five percentage points more than in 2023 – and that graduate job postings had declined by 24 per cent in 2024 ahead of a likely 16 per cent fall last year.

“For those who aren’t able to correct this course, the consequences are devastating,” she said. “In 2024, suicide was the leading cause of death for Australians aged between 15 and 44. Employment that is meaningful and purposeful is a huge part of improving the mental health of young people. When you’re instead forced to endure the humiliation ritual of modern job seeking, it weighs on your mental health. It makes you wonder why on earth you…saddled yourself with tens of thousands of dollars of debt.”

Payman said that as well as appropriating graduates’ jobs, AI was assuming control of the job selection process. “In the AI age, an alarming number of applications aren’t being sent or received by humans,” she told the Senate.

“If you are still writing CVs and cover letters the old-fashioned way, you [risk] leaving out an element of the selection criteria that your artificially enhanced competitors haven’t. It feels like you’re just throwing application after application into a big fat void...and being rejected before another human has even caught sight of your application.

“The entire point of a job application and interview is to determine whether someone is right for a workplace and whether the workplace is right for them. Instead, a bizarre battle of simulacra plays out, often without any humans from either side actually having read anything that the other has written.

“Those lucky few who do find themselves employed are looking around every corner to see if the AI that helped them get the job is waiting to take it away again.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com