Australia - Attracting the indigenous, rural and poor to university

By Geoff Maslen. When Australia’s federal government lifted its enrolment limits on the nation’s 38 public universities this year, it also told the institutions to start boosting the number of indigenous, rural and poor students.
For decades, successive governments have tried to increase the proportion of students who typically have been under-represented, especially students from low socio-economic status (SES) families who comprise around 15% of the university student population but whose share of the overall population is 10% more. In launching the Labor government’s ‘education revolution’ in 2010, Prime Minister Julia Gillard set a target of universities having 20% of their undergraduates from low SES backgrounds by 2020. Releasing annual enrolment figures last month, Tertiary Education Minister Senator Chris Evans said the number of low SES undergraduates had increased by 26,456 since 2007, a rise of 24%. Evans said enrolments of regional and indigenous students had also risen to record levels, “reversing an historical trend that had often seen them locked out of higher education.