On Selective Schools and the Saturday Schooling Pressures of Getting into University in Australia

Sorry to tell you friend, the NSW Board of Studies Rigged it from the Start

A Broad Introduction

The Higher School Certificate, as it is known in Australia’s most expensive state of NSW, is the final year standardised testing high schools all need to comply with to qualify for government allotted spaces in the major universities. It is a system designed with a statewide ranking system known as the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) which replaced the previous tests my parents generation had to spend almost a year of their life stressfully complying with and that was the much more simplistic Tertiary Education Rank (TER).

As the demand for higher education associated degrees and the hunger of corporatised neoliberal universities grew. One had to compete for the “right” to have a government loaned place in a competitive course against reserved seating dedicated to a revolving permanent population of almost two million international students nationally, which in effect don’t need to go through any of the comparable entry testing measures because they pay their way through university on the emerging economy oligarch money of their tax-dodging parents.¹

Economically Rigged from the Start

To successfully squeeze into a government allotted reserve seating within the universities of your own home country one in my generation needs to generally either needs to be born with a strain of autism lending itself well to formulaic and methodical thinking, or be born into the upper echelon’s of Australia’s high achieving immigrant intelligentsia of the Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese or affluent Hindu-Indian provincial (typically Punjab, Kerala or Gujarat) variety. To score on this front would mean having highly disciplined and somewhat social life depriving parents who would send you to Saturday school if they could and then whisk you away the next day to sport or creative instrument lessons the next so they could prop you up to their friends and extended family.

A typical advertisement for the large scale million dollar weekend HSC tutoring industry in affluent immigrant intelligentsia suburbs.

If you were lucky enough you might even get a government subsidised leg up if your parents couldn’t afford private schooling fees and you would be accepted into the semi-public quasi government marks factory selective schooling system following a test when you were around 11 to 12 years old.

There’s already a million opinion articles and papers released each year piled on top of one another decrying how unequal Australia has been since it inherited the private schooling system and only further entrenched it with this type of quasi-government support. Each year you get piece after piece throwing eggs at the lack of funding for refugee and aboriginal dense suburbs and rural towns where youth gang violence, truancy and drugs have been a historical commonplace. Teachers are often hardened by these schools and immigrants from overseas such as England, Ireland and continental Europe get visa boosts for trying to endure the worst of them (especially when they are women receiving highly aggressive sexualised jeering by teenage boys).

As depicted above, James Ruse Agricultural High School, is the highest performing school in NSW and often has is often anecdotally joked about its minority of local “conventionally European-Australians” making up no more than five to ten people in a grade of a bit over 100 students. It also a government supported selective school which topped the HSC for over 26 years and in some years has 50% of the grade get above 99.00 ATAR which mean they were within the top 1% of the state’s achievers.

This phenomenon, while sensitive to many due to its culturally and racialised connotations, is also controversial to some of the broader Australian general public whom may have attended trade school or dropped out of high school or university. Often followed by the mockery of this less successful broader public majority by more successful immigrant intelligentsia class my dad’s side of the family and other friends inhabited (see the colloquial jabs of “old white bastard”, “useless bogan”, “yobbo” or “povvo”).

Unfortunately, and sometimes quite tragically, high achievers at my university were known to completely dive in their results as soon as they got access to an independent stream of alcohol and society event social life. They would even be known in extreme cases to bomb out altogether and develop need to go on alcohol dependence recovery journeys via outside intervention. I won’t name names in this regard but I heard it from people and commonly heard about it way too many times for it to be funny.

My own onward thoughts

The Instagram page and fellow Australian Sydney based Substacker

monkeyboy.sydney

is a Gen Z meme page curator and content producer which covers many of the odd Sydney based cultural phenomena we all grew up with no matter where in Sydney you were born, what ethnic group you were or what economic social strata. From what I understand he’s a Lebanese heritage Australian who moved into my native area of the Anglo-Continental European creative liberally-minded dominated inner west. Nonetheless he will still skewer us the same for our subtextual snobbery and pretentiousness with memes such as these.

He was also interviewed by the now much thinner and digital content focused Sydney Morning Herald (poor man’s New York Times) which surprisingly provided a good summary as to what Generation Z people think for readers in the Generation X and Boomer Generations. If you can get by the silly eye rolling daggy wit of Australian boomer journalism I’d definitely recommend the read.

All in all, there’s a reason a lot of Generation Z are as sarcastic, layered in irony and cynical as we are. It’s usually because we have high expectations for life based on what the world of success our parents had growing up in booming economies, near endless second opportunities and much cheaper housing. The fact those experiences weren’t met and that the same expectations on achieving highly were maintained in an economy which was seemingly rigged to be a lot harder for us made us some of the little shits we are today.

1. There are a lot of videos on this topic but I can link the following done from the perspective of a popular ex-Muslim second gen immigrant Australian YouTube personality. The Mass Immigration Crisis of Australia by The Cyberpunk Dingo.

I also partly based this assessment off repeated anecdotal stories I heard of the number of apartments bought in Sydney by mainland Chinese investors which had the widely anecdotally common story of bidding one’s boomer parents’ suburban Sydney family home around one or two million above what the market rated it if two cashed up Chinese millionaire class investors had their eye on the same land plot. Or the fact that suburbs such as Hurstville in Sydney’s south used to be describable centres of Italian, Greek and Bulgarian (North Macedonian) community heritage but were then forced out of these suburbs over the last ten to fifteen years by Chinese investors who wanted their suburban land plots. Now as one friend with strong proud good Greek boy views once said to me, “I saw a white bogan on the train trip home and I actually felt excited. This is the absolute state of my area of Sydney.”