Building Castles with no Foundation: Indigenous business education in Australia

This chapter is a personal insight into why higher education is failing Indigenous Australia in the areas of management, accounting, economics and entrepreneurship, disciplines that constitute the fundamental tools of leadership. The chapter is based on my observations as an Indigenous student after obtaining an Associate Diploma in Management Accounting at TAFE, a Bachelor of Business, a Masters of Business Administration and a PhD within a Graduate School of Business. I have experienced first hand the issues concerning the lack of student participation in the business discipline. To illustrate the scale of the problem: 'in one University the unofficial success rate for Indigenous [Business] students over a 15-year period has been 52 starters and only 2 finishers' (Truscott 2002, p. 1).