The Invisible Gate

Part 2 of a 3-part series on scholarships and equity.

ANU has the lowest proportion of low-SES students in Australia. Why do poor students not come to ANU?

For many, it’s because they perceive an unbearable level of financial risk. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 12.3% of households have a net worth of below $50k. Accommodation at B&G costs about $12k a year. That means if your parents were paying for your housing for 4 years, you might use up literally all their savings. And even if they could scrape up the cash, they wouldn’t want to be a financial burden – and paying over $10k a year for accommodation seems like a lot of money when they’re used to counting paychecks from Coles.

Paying for yourself is possible, but it’s very hard. For some students, money is the difference between attending university and dropping out or never accepting their offer. Imagine how much of a difference a scholarship can make to their life – being able to get a degree, to learn about whatever they love or find interesting, and to fulfill their potential. If they worked as hard as we did to earn their place here, they should have as much opportunity as we do to thrive at this university.

And there may be other factors holding students back. Perhaps their parents didn’t attend university, or no-one from their school went to ANU and they don’t know a single person here. When I visited a regional school on the outskirts of NSW, they celebrated graduates who went to TAFE.

Is coming here still possible? Probably. But it would be terrifying – moving to a city where you have no friends, no job, no safety net except government welfare, nothing to grasp but a brochure and stories, and have to make ends meet. As a teenager, would you have made that leap?

Probably not. That’s why many people don’t come – even if they could get in, they’re blocked by an invisible gate that we fail to open.

This is a tragedy. Every time this happens, we are failing to give them equal access to education and opportunity. Even more so than course cuts or lower RM stipends – this is utterly unacceptable. It is a knife wound to our collective conscience.

They are the invisible cohort of ANU – the giant, unanswered “What If.” If things were different, maybe they would be the starry-eyed students we met in class. Maybe they would be our lab demonstrators or RMs. Maybe they’d even be our crush, or someone we used to love.

But they’re not. We’ve never met them, and we don’t even see their ghosts. We are so utterly blind to what could’ve been.

We miss out on so much. One of the most meaningful aspects of university is meeting different people. It’s eye-opening to hear about a variety of backgrounds and life stories, and to learn from perspectives and attitudes that clash with your own. We lose these opportunities when the pool of experiences different from our own starts to shrink. In high school and university, I’ve been in debates about Aboriginal affairs where no-one on either team has actually talked to an Indigenous person about the issue we’re arguing over. We also pay a price for neglecting diversity.

To be fair, we gain a lot from having talented students here too. I know this firsthand – many of my friends inspire me, and I’d be much worse off without them. But universities, by design, tend to prioritise academic achievement above all else – even inclusivity and moral duty. Maybe without a scholarship, one of my friends would’ve left for another university. I know it would suck – I’ve already lost friends to Oxford and MIT – but there is no loss of human potential.

We cannot say the same right now. The world changes for the worse when we bar a poor student from attending ANU.

Sometimes we have to choose between trying to get the best students, or giving more students an education. I think we should choose the latter.

We are Australia’s national university. It’s time for us to live up to the meaning of our creed.