Good News Story: More Indigenous Students Attend Uni
Posted by Amber Robinson at 12:31 PM on October 14, 2008
The participation rate of Aboriginies and Torres Strait islanders in tertiary education ahs long been a source of shame for Australia.
But new figures show that a record 9,370 indigenous students were enrolled in universities last year, with 1,495 students graduating.
The increase has prompting hope that a new generation of Aboriginal leaders will emerge, bringing fresh ideas and qualifications to improfve the dismal economic and life expectancy outcomes for black Australians.
Indigenous enrolments at degree-level studies and above rose from 61.5 per cent of all indigenous tertiary enrolments to 80.3 per cent between 1997 and last year, indicating an improvement in the quality of tertiary study undertaken (e.g from TAFE to universities) as well as more students.
The figures have been published in a paper by Maria Lane from the University of South Australia for 22 years.
“There is every reason to expect graduate numbers to continue to rise rapidly in the lead-up to 2020,” Ms Lane said in her research paper.
“By 2020, perhaps a third of all indigenous people will have a graduate in the immediate family. These are not just role models: they tend to be far more economically secure, with high rates of home ownership and, one suspects anecdotally, far better health, less addictions and almost non-existent rates of incarceration, domestic violence or suicide.”
Just to add to what Maria has described, a total of nearly twenty four thousand Indigenous people will have graduated by the end of 2008, this year, and there is every likelihood that fifty thousandwill have graduated by 2020. Curtently, about one in every nine Indigenous women and one in every fifteen Indigenous men are university graduates, and this will increase to one in every five women and one in every nine men by 2020. Currently, Indignoues women are commencing university studies at a better rate than non-Indigenous men, amazing as this might sound. Check out the DEST/DEEWR website on
http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/higher_education/publications_resources/statistics/publications_higher_education_statistics_collections.htm
if you have any doubts about this. Indigenous people have smashed another myth !