The ranking, and who measured it
The number that leads the announcement is a strong one, and it is not the university’s own marking of its homework. Charles Sturt retained the top national ranking for undergraduate employment in the 2025 Graduate Outcomes Survey, the annual survey released through the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching that polled more than 120,000 Australian graduates. On that independent measure, 90.5 per cent of Charles Sturt’s domestic undergraduates were in full-time work within four to six months of finishing their courses, first in the country. The university also placed sixth nationally for full-time employment among domestic postgraduate coursework graduates, at 91.6 per cent, and equal sixth for median undergraduate salaries, at $80,000. The latest Good Universities Guide put it first in Australia for graduate employment as well.
This matters locally because Charles Sturt is the Central West’s own university. It is a multi-campus regional institution with its Central West campuses at Bathurst, Orange and Dubbo, so when it leads the country on getting graduates into work, that is the region’s university doing it.
The figure that matters for the Central West
The employment ranking is the headline, but the figure with the most direct bearing on a Bathurst or Orange employer is the retention one. The survey confirmed that more than 80 per cent of Charles Sturt students from regional areas live and work in regional Australia after graduation. A university can rank first for jobs and still export its graduates to the cities; this one does not, and that is the difference that turns a good ranking into a regional-economy story.
Charles Sturt Vice-Chancellor Professor Renée Leon put the mission in those
terms. One of Charles Sturt’s core missions is to ensure that regional
Australian communities have a reliable pipeline of the skills they require in the face of
persistent skills shortages,
she said. Our courses produce the doctors,
nurses, teachers, dentists, physiotherapists, early childhood workers, agricultural
scientists and other professionals that are desperately needed.
She said the
results showed the university supporting the workforce needs of regional
Australia
. Those are exactly the roles the Central West struggles to fill, and they
are trained a short drive from where many of them will be worked.
Our read
Two honest qualifications keep this in proportion. The results are university-wide, not a Central West-only measure: Charles Sturt also runs campuses at Wagga Wagga, Albury and Port Macquarie and a large online cohort, so the ranking belongs to the institution rather than to Bathurst and Orange alone. And while the employment ranking is independent, the framing around regional purpose is the university’s own, resting on the survey’s retention finding. With those noted, the substance holds. For a region living the same skills shortages as the rest of country Australia, having the national leader in graduate employment headquartered on its doorstep, and keeping four in five of its regional graduates in the regions, is a real economic asset. If you run a hospital, a school or a farm business in the Central West, the 80 per cent is the number to watch, because it is the one that decides whether the people trained here stay to be hired here.