Content
The future of our region rests on education
23 December 2006
Earlier in the week the Sunshine Coast Daily ran an editorial in which it advised that the OP score is not the “be-all and end all”. You can, it also said, make your mark “other than by going to University”.
I agree entirely with these views, and it would be tragic if students with low OP’s saw themselves as failures. To focus on what you want to achieve and pursuing that goal can be undertaken in lots of ways.
But it would be deeply worrying if students turned against any further form of education or training for their lifetime, especially in a period of relatively high employment. It would become for individuals personally, for the future of our region, and for our democratic way of life, an extremely serious outcome.
Jefferson believed that the survival of democracies depended upon the education of people, and that eighteenth century view is now even more important in the twenty-first century, a century which will be driven by knowledge.
This region still has huge underemployment problems, particularly for youth. This region still has a huge brain-drain problem despite the University slowing that leakage of talented youth to courses and jobs elsewhere, with most of those youth not returning.
The Coast still only attracts 25% of its school leavers to universities, compared with 36.7% for the State, and numbers around 50% for some of our Western competitors.
Coast school leavers have high attrition and deferral rates, and many of those also do not return to education or training.
Yet, 82% of graduates are in full-time employment within four months of completing their degrees, with a median starting salary of nearly A$41,000.
Whilst I deeply empathise with those with lowly OP’s, and certainly encourage them to think only of future success, we need also to keep emphasising the vital importance of both education and training for the future of this region, and even the existence of this region with a separate identity.
Education and training at some stage of people’s lives, remain the strongest, but not the only, passports to long-term individual career development, as well as contributing to productive and informed citizenship.
Merry Christmas from everyone at the Uni.
Professor Paul Thomas is Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Sunshine Coast.