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The urban/mainstream turn in Indigenous higher education growth

By Joe Lane - posted Friday, 3 June 2016


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.

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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 ?

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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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