No need to fail : personal and institutional barriers to success for indigenous university students

Despite the landmark achievements of a number of Indigenous people in Australia, educational disadvantage of this population relative to the non-Indigenous population still remains, none more so than in the higher education sector. This paper presents the findings of study investigating factors related to the performance and retention of Indigenous Australian students at University. Its focus is the relationship between students' academic self-efficacy perceptions, expectancy of success and goal setting. Additionally, it examines Indigenous tertiary students' aspiractions and barriers to achievement, adding to the scarce body of knowledge in this field. A mixed-method qualitative/quantitative research design was adopted with 36 participants in an Aboriginal Rural Education Program (AREP). It was found that low academic self-efficacy perceptions, multiple socio-cultural and institutional barriers to achievement, and lack of strategies to negotiate these, were highly correlated with low expectancies of academic success and limited goal setting in tertiary studies for Indigenous students. Recommendations that arose from participant interviews are made for addressing these issues.