Why do Australian universities have higher employability than that of British in QS Graduate Employability Ranking 2019?
Know what's being ranked. Read the methodology. The QS graduate employability ranking uses:

Employer/Student Connections (10%). How many employers go to campus for presentations etc?

Alumni outcomes (25%). They take a list of the most influential people and sort them by the institutions they graduated from.

Employer ranking (30%). It's sourced from a survey sent by QS to employers asking them where their best employees graduate from.

Partnerships with Employers per Faculty (25%). They find out which institutions are collaborating with employers to do research.

Graduate employment rate (10%). How many graduates are employed after one year?

Then go to the employability rankings again and sort by indicator. We're comparing the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney to the Cambridge University and Oxford University (the two highest-rated British universities).


Sydney's scores are: 99.3 / 93.3 / 94.4 / 98.4 / 97.9
Melbourne's scores are: 78.5 / 92.6 / 97.9 / 95.4 / 98.1
Cambridge's scores are: 89.6 / 99.9 / 100 / 88.9 / 75
Oxford's scores are: 81 / 100 / 100 / 89.6 / 69.5


Note that these numbers are very likely expressed as a fraction of the top performer. In other words 69.5 employment rate doesn't mean that 30.5% of Oxford's graduates are still looking for a job after a year; 94.4 employer ranking doesn't mean that 94.4% of all employers think Sydney's graduates are good.

The British universities handily lead in the alumni outcomes &amp; employer ranking categories, and do (relatively) poorly in the partnerships with employers per faculty &amp; graduate employment rate categories, while the employer/student connections category is more mixed.

Draw your own conclusions. Some factors to think about:


Taken at face value, this implies that employers value Cambridge &amp; Oxford degrees very highly, but they still find it hard to get a job (an evident contradiction).
Further, if they actually do get a job, they are more likely go on to do really well (of course, this only applies to the very peak of the distribution).
Do you care about which institutions are collaborating with employers to do research? This will vary by student. Presumably if you're looking to do research in industry, this will be very important to you, while if you don't care about that then it doesn't matter.
Are you seeking a local job? If so, then campus presentations are a great opportunity to network. If you're not looking to get a job in the city/country then they probably aren't really relevant to you.
The UK recently went through and is still going through some political upheaval. That could've had an impact on its university graduates getting a job, especially if they're international students.