The Australian population continues to age, creating an ever-increasing reliance
on health services and health workers. This ageing phenomenon is occurring even more
rapidly in non-metropolitan areas. Like many other countries, there are acute shortages of
health workers in rural and remote areas of Australia. Students who train in rural areas are
more likely to work in rural areas upon graduation. Therefore, regional universities are the
mainstay for provision of new graduates to the rural health sector. These students have a
more diverse demographic and educational profile than their metropolitan peers and enter
university with identified risk factors for non-completion of their degree. New governmentdriven
funding targets prioritise student retention more than ever before. Research efforts in
the education sector are therefore being directed at understanding the changing nature of
student cohorts and mediating risk factors to enable equal chances of student success. This
chapter presents a case study of one student cohort (n=529) at a regional/rural multicampus
Australian university undertaken to characterise the nursing and paramedic
students of regional, rural and remote Australia and identify the challenges facing nonmetropolitan
students. The findings reveal that a high proportion of enrolled students have
more than one factor that has been identified with non-completion of tertiary study. The
revelation of this study concerns determining how students entering the university with
multiple risk factors do succeed given that statistical analysis indicates attrition should in
fact be higher than recorded.
Keywords: First generation, first in family, student retention, student progression,
regional, rural, nursing, paramedic, paramedicine, undergraduate, pre-registration,
bioscience, human biology, critical realism, demographic profile, student stories,
australia, higher education, health workers, attrition.
