It seemed like a good idea at the time, recalled the white-coated young woman with the stethoscope draped about her neck, a self-mocking smile on her face.

“I’d finished HSC and done very well, and the acceptances were flooding in – science, engineering, medicine. Not to boast, but I could have done any ‘hard science’ course at uni I fancied.”

What did she opt for?

Lori – we’ll call her that, as she finds the decisions of her impulsive youth a bit embarrassing these days – chose to study arts, with the emphasis on film studies, art history and, just for fun, calligraphy.

“I had just finished high school and my thinking was ‘Enough already with the challenging stuff. It’s my time to do what I want to do!’.”

We were talking in a coffee shop not far from the large country hospital where Dr Lori is now in the final year of a medical residency. She still loves movies and can’t keep her imagination on its leash whenever she reads a good book and thinks about how she might have brought the story to life on the screen.

For a while after graduating, Lori tried to make a career in film. But those efforts, she now admits, were only half-hearted and wilted as the rejection letters and rebuffed phone calls arrived, one after the other.

“Do I regret doing arts? No, not all,” she said.

“No knowledge is bad knowledge, and those years gave me a chance to think, to really think, about life and career and, well, the bottom line on what I should be doing and could be doing.”

Lori fancied a career directing movies – until she realised her gift for science was being wasted.

When she was 25, Lori applied to return to university, this time to study medicine. She was accepted, and has never looked back.

Nor will her earnings in the years to come: as an arts grad, and if she had actually managed to land an elusive job on a film set, according to the Department of Education and Training’s most recent survey, Lori might have expected to earn $45,000 in her first year out of university. As a doctor, the base expectation in the same 2017 study was $65,000.

Turn the clock forward any number of years and the gulf grows so much wider: if Lori becomes a general practitioner, as is her goal, she can anticipate annual earnings north of $200,000. As an arts grad, the figures suggest she would be lucky to make half that.

OK, you’re thinking, no surprise there – of course doctors will make more, a lot more, than arts grads.

But that would be to miss the point about the financial rewards of returning to university. Just as Lori’s income will rise if she goes on to become a specialist rather than a GP, so does the income of an arts grad who returns to pursue a master’s degree.

The rewards of further study

According to an ongoing survey by payscales.com, completing an arts master’s lifts earnings to as much as $92,000, depending on the industry.

In other fields, the income boost is even more pronounced. Take engineering: Straight out of university, an engineering grad with a bachelor degree can expect an average annual salary of about $65,000.

Add a master’s and that leaps immediately to $80,000, a 20 per cent premium. Over time, further increases widen the initial income gap to a full-blown gulf.

According to a relatively recent survey reported by Southern Cross University, top-level average salaries for engineers with no postgraduate certification top out at about $100,000, while a master of engineering is likely to boost earnings to a median of $150,000 in the shorter term. At the high end, that will nudge $250,000 as the degree holder’s career progresses.

What’s more, invest the time and effort to garnish your CV with a PhD and even master’s-level pay scales begin to seem positively modest.

Closing the gender pay gap

In the Graduate Salaries Survey, the largest statistically significant difference was for pharmacy graduates, with $45,500 separating the median salaries of masters and PhD graduates ($90,000). It was much the same with architecture, where a doctorate generates an average of $36,500 a year. For law and medicine, it was $34,500 and education $33,000.

There’s another gap, too, where the difference between a basic degree and post-grad qualifications is even more striking: male and female earnings. While the 2018 gender gap, as measured by the most recent Graduate Outcomes Survey, remained pronounced, that shortfall all but vanished for those whose post-grad studies opened the doors to jobs with the focus on research.

“In 2018, the gender gap in median salaries for postgraduate coursework graduates was $13,500 (14.6 per cent), down slightly from $15,000 (16.5 per cent) in 2017 and $14,300 (5.9 per cent) in 2016,” the survey found.

“In comparison, the gender salary gap for postgraduate research graduates was only $200 (0.2 per cent) in 2018, down from $3800 (4.2 per cent) and $5000 (5.7 per cent) in 2016.”

The take-home message of the various surveys is basic: Additional qualifications are a powerful incentive for employers to welcome you aboard, which goes a long way to explaining why growth in post-grad enrolments has soared in recent decades.

The five years to 2017 witnessed a 46 per cent rise in the number of people with postgraduate degrees. Viewed over a longer time frame, the expansion of post-grad ranks amounted to an eye-popping 123 per cent over ten years. The statistics explain why.

As of 2018 – the most recent data – 97.9 percent of male post-grads were participants in the labour market, with female post-grads just a whisker behind at 97 per cent.

The lesson could not be more clear. Just like Dr Lori’s career switch from movies to medicine, pursuing qualifications is an investment that pays off – and keeps paying off.