Fat salaries prove too much for undergraduates

摘要

Hand-in-hand with the booming resources activity in Western Australia has been the flight of second year geology and engineering students from universities as they are lured by the big dollars on offer from mining companies. Currently geologists with only 18 months experience in the field are demanding and receiving pay packets of up to 95,000 percent per annum. This is all well and good, but does it come at a cost? The first area to notice the impact has been the universities themselves with the numbers of honours graduates continuing to drop. WA Chamber of Minerals and Energy director Reg Howard-Smith confirmed it was an issue of concern, adding it was also a world-wide trend, particularly in Western nations. He said the mining and oil and gas companies were looking to less and less qualified staff to fill the ranks. "We were looking at a program with Curtin University this year to bring graduate mining engineers from India to do post-graduate studies here, but that didn't get off the ground because people were getting jobs at the completion of their undergraduate degree and were not really interested in doing post graduate studies," Howard-Smith said.