NUS graduates enjoy high salaries and good employment prospects
- Higher starting salaries for graduates from 28 courses and better full-time employment rates for graduates from 12 courses
- More than nine in 10 fresh graduates from Business, Computing, Engineering Nursing, Yale-NUS College employed within six months of completing their final exams
- Graduates from Computing, Engineering, Science and Law achieve improvements in both employment rates and salaries
Graduates of the National University of Singapore (NUS) continue to achieve good employment rates and earn high starting salaries in 2018.
In particular, NUS fresh graduates from 28 courses in full-time permanent employment achieved higher starting salaries1, while overall employment rates2 for NUS graduates from 12 courses have also increased. Graduates from Computing, Engineering, Science and Law enjoyed improvements in both salaries and overall employment rate.
These results were based on the latest Joint Graduate Employment Survey 2018, which was jointly conducted by NUS and the other Autonomous Universities.
Professor Ho Teck Hua, NUS Senior Deputy President and Provost, said, "NUS places a strong emphasis on enhancing the future-readiness of our graduates. We are therefore heartened that NUS graduates continue to enjoy high employability and competitive salaries amidst a highly competitive and volatile job market. We will continue to enhance our industry-relevant curriculum and career preparation programmes to enable our students to acquire deep domain expertise and workplace readiness skills so that they can stay adaptable and nimble in today’s complex and rapidly changing world.”
“The NUS enrolment is valid for 20 years from the point of admission. We are fully committed to supporting our graduates in their learning journey even after they enter the workforce, through the NUS Lifelong Learners Programme. Over the next few years, we can expect a vibrant community of lifelong learners at NUS, with each of them making positive and impactful contributions to Singapore and the society at large,” Prof Ho added.
Nine in 10 NUS fresh graduates secured employment within 6 months after final exams; Almost full employment for follow-up NUS graduates
5,108 out of a total of 6,699 full-time fresh NUS graduates from the Class of 2018 and 600 out of 877 follow-up NUS graduates3 participated in the joint survey. The overall employment rate for fresh graduates from NUS was 90.0%, which is higher than 89.4% last year. Another 2.6% of NUS fresh graduates in the labour market have either accepted a job offer pending commencement of duty or are actively starting a business venture.
Fresh graduates from Dentistry achieved full employment. More than nine in 10 fresh graduates from Business, Computing, Engineering, Nursing and Yale-NUS College (Yale-NUS) were employed within six months of completing their final exams.
In addition, graduates from 12 courses in Business, Computing, Engineering, Nursing, Music, Science, and Law achieved a higher overall employment rate in 2018, compared to 2017.
Please refer to Annex 1 for the list of courses in which graduates have achieved higher employment rates compared to 2017.
Competitive salaries for NUS graduates in full-time permanent employment
The survey also revealed that the mean gross monthly salary of fresh NUS graduates in full-time permanent employment was $3,779 in 2018, which is 3.3% higher than the $3,659 in 2017.
The median gross monthly salary of fresh graduates from NUS in full-time permanent employment remained competitive at $3,500 in 2018.
Graduates from 28 courses in Arts and Social Sciences, Business, Computing, Business Analytics, Industrial Design, Project and Facilities Management, Real Estate, Engineering, Nursing, Science, Law, Pharmacy, as well as those offered by Yale-NUS College, achieved improvement in starting salaries.
Please refer to Annex 2 for the list of courses in which graduates have achieved higher starting salaries compared to 2017.
Footnotes:
1 Starting salary here refers to graduates’ median gross monthly salary.
2 The overall employment rate refers to the number of graduates working on a full-time permanent, part-time, temporary or freelance basis, as a proportion of graduates in the labour force (i.e. those who are working, and those who are not working but are actively looking and available for work) as at 1 November 2018.
3 Follow-up graduates refer to those from the Architecture Class of 2015, who took part in the survey upon completion of their practical training, and graduates from Law, Medicine, and Pharmacy courses, who took part in the survey after completing their one-year practical law course, pupilage or housemanship/first-year residency/pre-registration training upon completion of their studies in 2017.
