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VC’ S CORNER
much less likely to be available, even if it is desired. Nor, often, are specialist teachers or good equipment. Excursions are necessarily long and arduous, and may be financially out of reach of parents.
Such challenges, and other limitations of regional living, make it difficult for regional schools to attract and retain teachers. And the regional student is likely to be steeped in a different culture to their city peer, one inherently less likely to have higher education as part of its history, with different ambitions and different ideas about success.
( My own aspirations on leaving high school – aspirations informed by my background – were to get a TAFE certificate in pharmacy. It was only my school principal’ s insistence that I attend university that persuaded me to reach higher than my modest aspirations.)
The combined realities of regional living ensure that far fewer regional youth have the qualifications to enter university, or the cultural incentives to do so, compared with their inner-urban peers. In NSW, a student needs three Band 5 ATARS to enter an education degree. If they are from an outerregional area, their chances of achieving this are close to zero.
Australia is the only country in the world to rely on a single metric to gauge student potential, even as the unquantifiable nature of human potential undermines that metric’ s usefulness.
For students who enter university with an ATAR between 50 and 80, there is no correlation between their ATAR and their university performance. Of the students who enter university with an ATAR lower than 60, nearly two-thirds succeed in obtaining a degree.
We are in a time when a bachelor’ s degree has become the base unit of attainment for many jobs. By using the ATAR as the initial hurdle to be cleared before people can access higher education and its pathway to employment, we deny many the chance to access a whole spectrum of opportunity.
At the University of New England, we have endeavoured to rethink the role of university in people’ s lives, and how we operate the gates of higher learning. The university now has 23,000 students. Only about 1000 were enrolled using the ATAR.
Our admissions process looks for different indicators of potential. UNE’ s assessment framework includes recommendations from school principals, geography( to make allowance for those educated in more remote, disadvantaged areas), and an internal assessment to review study skills and career goals. For those still unprepared for universitylevel education, we provide other pathways to prepare for entry.
I am extremely proud of one particular outcome of this flexible entry system. This year, 47 per cent of our students were the first member of their family to enter university.
By providing an alternative pathway into higher education, UNE has developed a new generation of role models for our regional centres and farms, who will have higher expectations for their children than their parents had for them.
UNE is also exceptional in its understanding that education is not the sole right of the fresh young school-leaver with time to devote exclusively to study.
Another statistic I am perversely proud of: on average, a UNE student takes 9 years to complete a 3 – 4 year course of study.
Other numbers might help explain that phenomenon. Nearly three-quarters of
UNE’ s current students are aged 25 and older. Nearly 80 per cent study externally, and most of our students study part time. Our statistically average student is a 30-year-old woman with two children.
Within that nine years of study are the stories of everyday lives: people taking time away from study to raise children or help out in the family business, people running out of discretional funds, people questioning their direction in life.
Lives are complicated, but our students have a dogged commitment to learning. Of the 18,830 students who enrolled at the university in 2005, 77 per cent had completed or were still completing their studies in 2016.
It is my experience with these students – many of them so unlike the clichéd undergraduate of stock photographs – that has made me challenge the idea of a single metric as a predictor of success in higher education.
We are not devaluing the currency of higher education by encouraging the educationally disadvantaged to tread our halls. Education is one of the great vehicles of civilisation, and a generationon-generation increase in educational attainment benefits our whole society.
Instead of opening our doors only to the predictable few, we should be devising ways of catering for the many in our society who yearn for advancement but who believe the avenues are barricaded against them.
That means new paths into higher education, to make university attainable for those with sufficient ability, desire and determination, independent of their past level of educational attainment.
It is not a question of compromising integrity. Universities must retain their role as crucibles of thought and centres of educational excellence. But I believe we must make these rich environments more accessible, and that will not be achieved by measures of“ success” that discriminate in favour of those already advantaged.
There will always be an intellectual elite who make a disproportionate contribution to human affairs. But there are also the rest of us, striving to make the best of short, complicated lives.
Universities should be for the rest of us, too. ■
Professor Annabelle Duncan is vice-chancellor and chief executive of the University of New England.
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