The University of Canberra will review its curriculum and introduce work experience requirements for every degree in its bid to rank among Australia's top institutions for graduate employment within five years.
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The institution will also work to expand its international student base, focusing on a growing market in India, and next year break ground on a $2 billion development that will see 3300 new residences built on campus over the next two decades.
Vice-chancellor Deep Saini is so invested in UC's 2018-22 strategic plan Distinctive by Design that he this week committed to bid on an on-campus terrace home.
"This is where the vice-chancellor is going to retire. I'm itching to see this community develop," he said.
The review of degrees, units and student intake is partway done and will take effect from 2019. Led internally, Professor Saini said the audit would sweep through UC's five faculties to ensure the university's offerings reflected what was needed in the job market.
The institution's aim partly lines up with a Productivity Commission report released this week which called for universities to be transparent about the employability of their graduates. One in five graduates were underemployed, the report found.
"There will be some courses cut, there will be a number of units cut, there will be consolidation and there will be additions," Professor Saini said, later adding it did not mean a scalpel would be taken to humanities subjects.
"If all you're doing is enrolling lots of students in useless degrees then you are not doing anything good for yourself either.
"That said, these disciplines are necessary for people to learn. There's two ways to handle that. One is that you embed humanities in your broader offering, so your students don't come out simply trained as machines, they come out trained as broad thinkers and they have the benefit of having done that arts and sciences and so on, all of that together.
"The second thing is that there has to always be some room for that. If we just completely eliminate these things there are people that will follow an area of study for their passion."
Every degree will carry work experience requirements and the university will restructure degree programs and support services to offer lifetime career assistance to graduates.
A new staffing strategy will see UC actively recruit for positions and Professor Saini said there would be a "major cultural shift" on campus to ensure everyone was committed to the university's mission.
"You give them opportunities to express their talents," Professor Saini said.
"You give them the tools to express those talents. You give them the freedom to take risks and make mistakes.
"And you reward when they work together, when they come up with new ideas, you create a culture where the spirit is of 'why not? Let's give it a try, let's think about it'."
Data released by the federal government earlier this year showed more than 89 per cent of University of Canberra undergraduates found employment within four months of graduation, slightly above the national average of 88.6 per cent.
More than 85 per cent of postgraduate students from UC went on to full-time employment and more than 90 per cent were employed at all.
