The government has announced more changes to the way it intends to fund the higher education sector, in addition to the previously announced Job-Ready Graduates funding package. Under the latest proposal, students will be cut off from the HECS-HELP loan scheme when they fail more than half of their units in the first year of a degree. This policy will have a hugely outsized impact on Indigenous students and the broader Indigenous community. This is in addition to the earlier Job-Ready reforms which gut the humanities and Indigenous Studies disciplines, penalising all students who want to gain knowledge about our histories, cultures, and languages.
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What this round of proposed reforms does is penalise Indigenous students for trying to navigate a higher education system that was not just built without them in mind, but with their exclusion as a goal. In seeking to undertake their ideological war against a higher education sector they have long derided, the government has set back the hopes and aspirations for Indigenous students, decimated the academic disciplines bringing back our cultures, and neglected their own responsibility to "close the gap".
Indigenous completion rates sit well below the national average compared to non-Indigenous students. We take longer on average to complete our degrees, and fail more often doing them. Nine-year completion rates sit at 47 per cent for Indigenous students, compared to 74 per cent for the non-Indigenous cohort, and the four-year completion rate has never gone above 30 per cent. This is a large and ever-present gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, and these changes will have an outsized impact on this gap. It could set us back 15 years, or at the very least, hold us in place.
Failure is a necessary part of student growth. We see students every day who have gone from almost flunking out of a degree to being on the path towards graduation.
Indigenous people have not been particularly welcomed within higher education institutions. Racism and exclusion have long been rife within the sector. We are not used to managing how their systems work, how to navigate their material and workloads, and the clashes between Western and Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of being. All of these are hurdles in the system designed to prevent our engagement and presence, and overcoming them takes perseverance, work, and effort.
For the government to decide that failing four units within one year cuts you off from the funding offered to everyone else, and that has been offered to generations past without regard to academic talent, feels like an attack on the already disadvantaged. It will lead to our students not entering higher education in the first place, flunking out of one degree and never returning (something over 15 per cent of Indigenous students already do), or bouncing around a dozen different degrees in order to maintain their studies.
Failure is a necessary part of student growth. We see students every day who have gone from almost flunking out of a degree to being on the path towards graduation. Students who these reforms would kick out. Universities have processes to deal with what the government calls "non-genuine students"; what these reforms do is financially punish failure, financially punish disadvantage. UNSW professor Megan Davis calls it "the state doing things to us without us".
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Higher education for our people isn't just about knowledge for knowledge's sake, or to qualify for a particular job. It is about empowerment. Empowerment of ourselves as individuals, but also empowerment of our communities. Every single Indigenous graduate is someone who has achieved something their ancestors were forbidden from achieving. And they have a greater ability to better not just themselves, but their community. Every extra Indigenous teacher, doctor, lawyer or academic is of benefit to our society.
We want our community to achieve success and use that to find a better place. Stand on the shoulders of giants and reach upwards. These reforms are a stake through the heart of that. We also want non-Indigenous mob to enter the workforce and life with appropriate levels of cultural respect and understanding of Indigenous people. These reforms kill that dead in its tracks. We need to reject these proposals from the government. They're misguided and harmful to Indigenous students and communities.
- James Blackwell is a proud Wiradjuri man and currently an Indigenous Student Engagement Adviser at the University of Canberra's Ngunnawal Centre.