Indigenous university student success in 2013

Fields of Study [Table 11]

Enrolments:

Indigenous students are very much under-represented in Maths- and Science-oriented firlds, but this is compensated by higher enrolments in Arts, Social Science, Health and Education awards.

For all that, more than three thousand Indigenous students have enrolled in courses in Natural and Physical Sciences, and in Agricultural and Environmental scinces since 2001. This pales somehat beside the ten thousand or so enrolling in Education, and in Health, courses. All up, more than fifty nine thousand Indigenous students enrolled from 2001 up to 2013.

Enrolments in Health courses increased by 117 % from 2004, but in Education courses by only 33%. This reflects the shift in teaching from three-year to four year courses, and the attraction of alternatives such as Law, and the fact that, on the one hand, Nursing is still usually only a three-year course, and on the other hand, the great work being done by universities such as Newcastle in recruiting and preparing students for Medicine and other high-status courses.

Aboriginal-focussed courses are subsumed under the heading of 'Society and Culture': enrolments in that vast portmanteau term increased by 61 % between 2004 and 2013, while total award-level enrolments increased by 57 % in the same time. The data are not differentiated eough, but it could be surmised that enrolments in Law very likely more than doubled in that time.

Graduations:

While total graduations improved by 54 % over the period 2004-2013, the number of graduations in Agriculture and Environmental Sciences actually fell – total graduates in the Sciences grew from a pathetic 70 to a not-quite-so-pathetic 114, and totalled just over a thousand since 2001. In 2013, 427 Indigenous students graduates from Health courses, and 354 from Education courses, almost all at degree-level and above.

Total Graduations:

Since 2001, about 3,800 Indigenous students have graduated in each of the Health and Education fields. In fact, a total around eight thousand Indigenous students have graduated in Education awards since 1980.

Conclusion

The Indigenous population is rapidly differentiating into two populations, one oriented to work and the other to welfare, and this is reflected across the spectrum of Education, especially in compulsory school education: in the cities, amongst the working population, one could hazard that performance and Year 12 completion rates are not too different from those of non-Indigenous students. But, as we know from report after report, education in remote areas, with very few adults working in real jobs, children are being shockingly short-changed in terms even of bare literacy and numeracy and are leaving school even more unemployable than their parents. Clearly a huge task awaits dedicated staff in remote schools.

But at universities, by comparison, success has been phenomenal. Of their own volition, some 120,000 Indigenous adults have, at some time since 1980, enrolled in university courses, overwhelmingly in mainstream courses. Of course, some universities have done a much better job of publicising, recruiting, preparing and supporting Indigenous students than others.

But that's the subject of another paper.