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The Forum > Article Comments > Annual Indigenous Higher Education Update > Comments

Annual Indigenous Higher Education Update : Comments

By Joe Lane, published 19/11/2020

Higher education has been quite a success story for Indigenous people, particularly for urban women.

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This is an excellent piece of good news. With indigenous women leading the way the status of indigenous people will continue to improve. I hope that many of these students take a degree in law so that they will be more educated than the police who continue to harass people of colour because they are people of colour. I look forward to indigenous doctors, dentists, vets, teachers, nurses, lecturers and professors, geologists, surveyors and every other profession requiring a tertiary qualification. I hope that indigenous students can remain grounded and be both of colour and of qualification.
This is glorious news.
Posted by Brian of Buderim, Thursday, 19 November 2020 10:07:12 AM
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The author highlights the "success story" of rising recorded indigenous participation in higher education without adequately examining the reasons for it.

He did briefly refer to demographics in the following passage. "Aboriginal people overwhelmingly lived in rural areas until well after the War, and usually in smaller towns. So most Aboriginal children received only primary-level education until well into the sixties, unless their families had moved into the cities (including the rural cities) earlier".

What is not explained is the effects of changes in the definition of "Aboriginal" after 1967, which resulted in the measured indigenous population "exploding" in censuses from 1971 onwards, especially in non-remote areas.

To be counted as Aboriginal there used to be a requirement to be 50 per cent of more indigenous blood. The requirement now is to be of indigenous descent (no matter how small). With indigenous marriage rates to non-aboriginal people also now well over 90 per cent in the cities, it is the change in definition coupled with marriage patterns that are dominating the numbers.

In effect the indigenous population in the cities is becoming genetically and culturally "less indigenous" and it is this demographic that is driving higher indigenous university participation. The participation rises are far less dramatic when taken as a percentage of the (rapidly growing) recorded indigenous population.
Posted by Bren, Thursday, 19 November 2020 10:59:04 AM
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Thanks Brian,

There is much more data on:

http://www.education.gov.au/student-data.

If you scroll down to 'Section 6: Indigenous students', and: 'Section 14: Award course completions'. The data there goes back only to 2004.

The ABS figures are, I suspect, inflated, by maybe 15-20 %, which means of course that total population figures used by the ABS are also inflated: on that criterion, total Indigenous population in 2016 would have been around 550,000, not 649,000.

There is a bit of a myth that the Indigenous population is growing rapidly, but looking at the last few Censuses, at the numbers of babies born in each five-year period, what is a bit suspect is that the total population grows from one Census to the next by MORE than the total numbers of babies born in the meantime. If one takes the time, this can be checked by comparing Censuses on:

http://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2006/quickstat/0

- births recorded in the 2016 Census over the previous five years totalled 73,263, but the total recorded population went up by 100,801 - from 548,370 to 649,171. Clearly, either some Indigenous people are re-identifying, or non-Indigenous are mis-identifying.

I think that, like the Australian-born population generally, the Indigenous population is relatively ageing: birth-rates are quite low (and have been for fifty years now), but Indigenous people are living longer, although clearly not long enough, given the persistent disparities in life expectancy.

Joe
Posted by loudmouth2, Thursday, 19 November 2020 11:00:22 AM
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I'm quite enamoured with the program that places indigenous students in private schools as boarders. Seems to be having outstanding success and a template all governments could offer as an option, given the reported success of this still very limited private option!?
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 19 November 2020 11:01:54 AM
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Hi Joe,

A great piece of work, thanks for that.

One question, I would be interested to know, and I do suspect its so. The disproportionate ratio, 2:1 girls over boys, attaining tertiary education among Aboriginal children, is it indicative of indigenous peoples the world over. I know its a similar case for Maori, and there, there is a strong tendency for girls to achieve at a higher level disproportionately to boys. I suspect its not a case of girls over achieving, but rather a case of boys under achieving. What do you think, and what could be the reasons? Sorry that's two questions.
Posted by Paul1405, Thursday, 19 November 2020 9:22:19 PM
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Onya Joe, you should be proud.

Too busy to say that yesterday!

Dan
Posted by diver dan, Friday, 20 November 2020 9:10:48 AM
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Hi Paul,

Yes, that disparity between Indigenous girls and boys - it could be to do with at least two factors:

* Indigenous secondary students are less likely (and maybe boys more so) to go for Maths and Sciences, and so the boys shut themselves out of all of those male-stereotyped courses and careers;

* vice versa, the girls tend to enrol at universities in Arts, Education, Nursing, Social Sciences and Humanities, which don't need so much Maths. Boys tend to shun female-stereotyped courses.

When I was working in Indigenous support programs at universities here in SA, I had hoped that similar focussed support programs would be initiated in secondary schools, and even upper primary school classes. When we ran Career Aspiration workshops, we went down to Class/Grade Six and even lower if we could. Pity it didn't happen.

I still remember in about 1994 a little girl, actually in Grade Two, coming up to me after a session at a remote community and asking "What you fellas doing ?" I said that we were encouraging kids to think about what sort of jobs they wanted to do when they grew up, and giving them stuff about the careers they liked. "You got anything about Nursing ?" she asked. I gave her a CES leaflet about what was involved in Nursing. Last I heard, she was working in a medical surgery. Grade Two.

Usually these days, university programs send out staff to talk only to kids in Years 11 and 12, if that. Of course, most kids have already made up their minds by then. Almost utterly useless.

One obstacle, even from people supposedly working in Indigenous education, was the complaint that "Yeah, but not all Indigenous kids are going to go to university." I took that to mean that those people thought that Indigenous people shouldn't be going to university at all, or in decent numbers, it was only for a select few. Utter bastards.

Joe
Posted by loudmouth2, Friday, 20 November 2020 9:42:43 AM
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