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The urban/mainstream turn in Indigenous higher education growth

By Joe Lane - posted Friday, 3 June 2016


 

In Indigenous higher education across Australia, degree-level and post-graduate commencement numbers doubled between 2005 and 2014, from 2790 to 5600. This followed a mere 57 % rise over the previous ten years.

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In 2014, more than two thousand Indigenous students graduated from universities across the country, raising the total number of graduates to more than thirty six thousand.

These rises were accompanied by a halving of sub-degree commencements between 1994 and 2004, and again between 2004 and 2014 – from a total of 485 back in 1994 to only 126 in 2014.

So total award-level commencements rose from 2263 in 1004, to 3000 in 2005, and to 5,726 in 2014. A detailed Database can be found on: www.firstsources.info .

The median age of commencing Indigenous students has fallen from nearly 30 to around 24, and in that age-group, there would currently be about 11,000 people, so commencements in 2014 represented the equivalent of around half of the entire median age-group, and graduations represented about a fifth of the median age-group. Indigenous university participation and graduation is roughly equivalent to that of Europe as a whole.

However, there are many strands to this story: until the late 1990s, universities hosted sub-degree courses, often in Indigenous-oriented courses specifically for Indigenous Special Entry students, courses which provided a major pathway for outer suburban, rural and remote students, usually mature-aged and female, to gain any tertiary qualification at all. Often specific Study Centres were set up in key country towns, some as far back as the late seventies, for what were mainly Special Entry students.

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From the late nineties, universities started to phase out sub-degree courses. Students completing those courses, usually Associate Diplomas, were guided into degree-level courses in Indigenous-oriented fields. But once these students had either dropped out or graduated, there were very few Indigenous students across the country enrolled in Indigenous-oriented awards of any kind: few Indigenous students have ever enrolled in degree-level Indigenous courses, contrary perhaps to popular myth.

In any case, the great majority of Indigenous commencements have always been in mainstream courses and therefore, Indigenous student support has, against some resistance from Indigenous Studies departments, included mainstream students. But Indigenous enrolments in Indigenous-oriented courses of any kind have rarely ever exceeded 15 % of commencements (including post-graduate commencements). They currently make up barely 2 % of all Indigenous under-graduate commencements. At many universities, Indigenous-oriented courses have now been phased out entirely.

Phasing out lower-level Indigenous-oriented courses should have had the effect of reducing Indigenous commencement (and eventually enrolment) numbers. But (not quite fortuitously), at roughly the same time, the number of Indigenous school students completing Year 12 or matriculating, began to rise rapidly, and since 1999, has more than quadrupled. So Indigenous commencements in degree-level courses more or less kept pace between 1998 and 2005 – but from 2006 to 2014, almost doubled. It's not coincidental, by the way, that a marked increase in the Indigenous birth-rate can be traced back to about 1981.

It's also not coincidental that universities which focussed on Indigenous-oriented courses, to the neglect of Indigenous students in mainstream courses, have suffered the worst growth rates since 2005 – for example, University of Technology, Sydney and the University of South Australia. In fact, Edith Cowan and Curtin Universities have actually experienced a decline in Indigenous degree-level commencement numbers while those numbers have more than doubled elsewhere.

It's likely that the vast majority of these new degree-level commencing students were from urban areas, enrolling on-campus, at urban-based universities. I would also hazard a guess that they tended to be from working families, and very likely inter-marrying families. In other words, that almost all under-graduate commencements are not only at degree-level but that they involve almost predominantly urban-based students.

But conversely, one consequence of the abandonment of sub-degree courses, especially for Special entry students, was that Indigenous people in rural areas – who overwhelmingly tended to enrol through Special entry procedures – were cut adrift, with their major access to tertiary study taken away. So rural-town (and outer suburban) Indigenous participation in university courses has very seriously declined. At one unnamed university, where a fifth of total Indigenous commencements had, during the nineties, been of students from rural areas, often working through specific Study Centres, it is possible that such commencements have become, if not extinct then seriously endangered. The Study Centres are gone now, and institutional memory of effective student support has gone with them.

So what are rural people doing, if they aren't enrolled in study? In one way or another, it is likely that they have settled for a life on welfare. It is likely also that the Year 12 completion rates of Indigenous school students in rural, remote and outer suburban schools has declined. Another generation of Indigenous people is in danger of falling down the rabbit-hole, with large sections of the Indigenous rural population following the example of the remote communities, choosing welfare over education and work and thus Widening the Gap between working and welfare-oriented people, not just socially and educationally, but spatially.

But this development – which Indigenous education 'leaders' seem to be totally unaware of – is not the whole story. As mentioned above, total commencements at degree-level have risen strongly over the past ten years. But this has accompanied a sharp decline in rural involvement, so it is likely that that rise is exclusively an urban one. And from the numbers in the median age-group, one could estimate that urban commencements represent a very high proportion of that median age-group living in the cities, perhaps as high as three-quarters.

Here is a paradox: Indigenous university commencements have risen by a healthy 7-8 % per year and yet rural, remote and outer suburban participation has seriously declined. It is entirely possible that the participation of urban people from working families has risen steadily by as much as 12 % per year. The Gap is Widening, not Closing. Worse – universities have largely disbanded the very programs that would have given rural, outer suburbs and remote people that vital leg-up and the institutional memory of Indigenous student support is fading, even if occasionally the wheel is half-heartedly re-invented, only to be abandoned again.

So since the late nineties, underlying the healthy rise in Indigenous university commencement numbers, has been a fundamental rift, yet another Gap, in the participation rates of rural areas and the cities: it could be that, currently, Indigenous participation at universities has become an urban phenomenon. Rural people have chosen welfare, in the absence of other options.

This raises two horrible questions for which Indigenous leaders have no answers, and perhaps no inkling:

Is the Aurukun Syndrome spreading to rural towns and the outer suburbs ?

And are there two Gaps which are Widening, between Non-Indigenous people and Indigenous people, AND between welfare-oriented and education- and work-oriented Indigenous people ?

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About the Author

Joe Lane is an independent researcher with a long-standing passion for Indigenous involvement at universities and its potential for liberation. Originally from Sydney, he worked in Indigenous tertiary support systems from 1981 until the mid-90s and gained lifelong inspiration from his late wife Maria, a noted leader in SA Indigenous education.

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