Indigenous commencements, enrolments and graduations at universities rose a very healthy eight per cent in 2015.

6,161 Indigenous people commenced university at award-level, 97 % at degree-level and above. 14,500 Indigenous students were enrolled at degree-level and above. 2,190 Indigenous students graduated, nearly a third at post-graduate level. Two-thirds were women. 95+ % are enrolled in mainstream courses.

Graduate numbers now total around forty thousand, and rising at a steady 5 % p.a. Fifty thousand by 2020 is very likely, and eighty thousand by 2030 is on the cards.

To put these numbers in perspective, about 10,500 Indigenous people were in the age-group at which the median Indigenous student graduated, 26-year-olds.

Of course, these figures reflect the fact that the majority of Indigenous people live in metropolitan areas, with a minority living in outer-suburban, rural and remote areas. Given that the drift to the cities is probably not much more than a trickle these days, this suggests that the current urban population has been urban for three or more generations now, and is unlikely to ever be interested in moving to the country, or to remote ‘communities’.

Indigenous women are commencing university studies at a slightly better rate (given a parity figure of 2.8 %) than NON-Indigenous men.

Crude attrition is around 28 %. The elite universities tend to have very low attrition rates, coupled with poor numbers of commencements. On the other hand, some universities recruit, it seems, willy-nilly (one even suspects that low-entry-level students are being enrolled externally, a recipe for disaster) but not surprisingly have high attrition rates.

But some ‘Goldilocks’ universities have healthy commencement, graduation AND attrition rates: Griffith, Charles Sturt, Newcastle, Q.U.T. and Western Sydney are the stand-outs.

On the other hand, most Western Australian universities have exciting challenges before them, as do Federation University (formerly Ballarat), Victoria, RMIT and Bond universities.

Data can be found on the federal Ed. Dept’s web-site: https://www.education.gov.au/student-data and a more complete database, going back to the early nineties, can be found on: www.firstsources.info, just as soon as I can put the latest data up