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THE prospects are dreadful if participation in further education does not increase.
Northern Tasmania is condemned to remain a pocket of poverty.
It will be a residual population; essentially what is left when the jobs are filled and the rest of the skilled leave the state.
Further education enrolments in Northern Tasmania do not begin to reflect the kind of tertiary participation found elsewhere in Australia.
In the north overall, 40 per cent are leaving school without a trade or TCE.
It is becoming a place of unemployment, social distress, drugs and poor health.
For all our natural advantages socially it is becoming death in paradise.
There is deep cultural resistance to further education.
It is simply seen as irrelevant, unobtainable or unnecessary.
I frequently go up to Burnie to give students the personal attention they deserve but find among some in first year a terror of the unfamiliar with a need to reassure they can and will succeed.
The Pro-Vice Chancellor on the Cradle Coast Campus Janelle Allison is a fierce advocate of regional learning but admits it is yet to be a place where the community comes freely and naturally.
Overcoming this cultural resistance takes major resources and considerable time.
Ireland, which began this task in the 1960s took over 20 years to change cultural attitudes.
The University’s plan to extend pathway programs into learning is part of the answer but it is only economically viable for the University if these attract HEC funding.
This ultimately condemns students to even higher debt loads at completion of a full tertiary degree. Increased debt will not encourage increased participation.
The Federal Government has touted its higher education ``reforms'' as part of the solution but it is primarily about the status of large sandstone universities, about saving money and raising the student contribution and debt, not about regional institutions and their particular issues.
$400 million was dangled as a carrot and snatched away by politicians miffed they did not get their way.
If there were real concern for the regions this political pout would not have occurred.
In 1939 Tasmanian Premier Albert Ogilvie vowed to remove fees for secondary schools and did, within 24 hours of election.
It sounds quaint today but it was a major move to make completion of grade 10 possible. We need a similar vision today.
In the 1980s the Federal government dropped unemployment benefit for school age teenagers and paid an education allowance greater than the dole.
The increase in enrolments was dramatic.
Today the education allowance trails the dole and students struggle to survive.
The solution is not just greater economic incentives but that is where it begins, not with increased fees.