There may be something in what you say, Wing, although I still cherish some remnants of affection for the promises of socialism. Pity about the delivery.

Your last note: yes, the more education, the more power people have to break away from dependence on welfare parasite organisations. Up to the end of last year, 24,000 (twenty four thousand) Indigenous people had graduated from universities across Australia. Commencements, enrolments and graduations are at record levels. In 2007, the last year of figures, 1068 Indigenous women graduated from universities, or the equivalent of about 30 % of the Indigenous female graduate median age-group. Partly to support your thesis, currently, Indigenous women are participating in higher education at higher rates than non-Indigenous men, and at twice the rate of Indigenous men.

100 or 1,000 Indigenous graduates would be an elite. 24,000 is a bit too big to be an elite - it represents about one in every ten Indigenous adults (one in every seven Indigenous women, one in every five urban Indigenous women). Check out the data on DEEWR's website: 'DEST Statistical Collections'. It's all there.

By the end of 2010, there will be nearly 27,000 Indigenous graduates, and because of the huge increase in the birth-rate after about 1985, there could easily be fifty thousand (50,000) Indigenous graduates by 2020. Goodbye, elite !

And fifty thousand not on welfare, not dependent on parasite organisations, but working and living in the mainstream, as they choose to (it's called 'agency'). Goodbye, parasites !

Joe

Loudmouth,
Out of all the indigeneous graduates, how many get a job that will enable them to repay the costs of their education?.

If there are a large number of indigenous female graduates as compared to males, then this is a concern, as 2 out of 5 female graduates do not work sufficient years to repay their HECS fees. If these female graduates become social workers (likely), then they will probably be employed by government, who get the money from the taxpayer. So the taxpayer still has to pay for it.

This is becoming the most important factor for universities. If universities continue to churn out graduates who don’t repay their HECS fees, then who is going to pay off those HECS fees. Asking the federal government to pay for it is basically asking the taxpayer to pay for it. If the public have to pay for it all, then is there sufficient wealth in the country for the public to pay for the universities.

Considering the HECS debt and also the national debt, I don’t think there is sufficient wealth in the country to pay for the universities, which means that the universities are non-economic and non-sustainable.

While the universities have been good at producing social workers and arts students, good at employing feminists and denigrating males, good at training overseas students for overseas companies who then compete against Australian companies, and good at importing everything they can possibly purchase with taxpayer funding, the universities have not been very good at generating sufficient wealth inside the country to even run the universities.

Somewhere my previous post went astray.

When you are talking about aboriginies, you need to also take into account that a goodly proportion have either one white parent or three white grandparents or seven great grand parents, etc., and can still claim to be aboriginals. If you look at the past census figures for Oz and do a rough calculation based on the rate of increase in the number of people who claim to be aboriginals, by the end of this century, all Australians will be aboriginals. There are certain financial incentives/advantages, particularly in education, to being classified as an aboriginal, that are denied to poor whites.

David

From an earlier discussion on this topic;

The dramatic inequities that skew students chances at publicly funded university places are a source of growing frustration and anger within the public school community who see the whole situation as a massive rort.

These inequities were boosted through funding arrangements of the Howard government which saw top end private schools receive millions of dollars extra per year. One of the most expensive private schools in my area that benefited from this largesse boasted an ENTER score of 90 plus for almost one third of its students. A school of comparable size in a rural township had not a single student achieve a 90 plus result thus precluding them from high-end university places.

There is no doubt that there are many other ways of addressing the imbalance. Some of those suggested have included; broadening the selection critera past the basic score, differential funding for universities that accept students from lower SES and ability bands and fixing Commonwealth funding imbalances that allow private schools to have a monopoly over high-end places.

However the attitude taken by the Rudd government has given little hope for any substantial changes. It locked in the Howard government funding arrangements and has taken a head in the sand approach to the issue.

It would now appear that the only timely and equitable solution is to proportionally allocate university places by sector; public, catholic, and independent. Let the public school students who make up approximately 65% of the total have access to the same proportion of publicly funded university places in each course.

Naturally I will be accused of ‘dumbing down’ universities by giving places to those without what is deemed the appropriate merit, but in many cases those students haven’t had assess to the resources available to students in wealthier schools.

Let the ‘spendocracy’ compete in its own sector and let all of us strive for fairer access for all Australian students to our universities.

Where students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds are handicapped is high school. These students are not aptly guided in the process of achieving high tertiary ranks. In contrast, in the top private schools, the students are taken through subject primers and drilled using past examination papers.

The outcome for the underclass students is being ill-prepared to take the HSC – even those with high IQs. Alternatively, those students, who are from “good schools”, come to universities with high tertiary ranks, yet often lack the ability to act with autonomy and expect an “A” for a very ordinary assignment. Neither situation is desirable.

What is required is either, a greater emphasis in Year Twelve on that Year being a foundation year for university or, as in the United States, the first year of a four year university programme serves the same purpose. I would prefer the latter solution, because (a) some students will wish to terminate in Year Twelve and (b) moderately able high school teachers will often have graduated from courses among the lower tertiary rank entry (60-70).

WAL,

"The graduates, with few skills that anyone would actually pay for, go on to become the armies of welfare state parasites endlessly expanding their empires - on flex time to boot." - WAL

The market will pay for MBAs and Quantitative PhDs: not for Arts or Philosophy graduates. I assume you are a LLB Ec (or similar), somewhere in the middle.