La Trobe University Bendigo: Keeping Graduates in Regional Victoria

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, established in 1964 as one of Victoria's first regional higher education facilities, has been central to the development of Central Victoria's professional workforce, providing the nursing, teaching, business, and science graduates whose careers have built the public services and commercial enterprises that a growing regional city requires. The campus's history, predating the creation of La Trobe University as such, reflects the recognition in Victoria's 1960s planning that regional higher education was essential for the development of the state's regional cities.

The campus's health sciences programs, operating in close partnership with Bendigo Health and the rural and remote health facilities of the Loddon Mallee region, provide the clinical training placements and the research collaboration that sustain the quality of health professional education in Bendigo. The rural health focus of the Bendigo campus, reflecting the distinctive health challenges and workforce requirements of the regional health environment, provides the professional education perspective that metropolitan campus programs cannot duplicate.

The education and nursing programs that are the campus's largest offerings by student numbers produce the teachers and nurses that Central Victorian schools and health services depend on for their workforce. The proportion of graduates who remain in the region after qualification, drawn by the career opportunities and the lifestyle that the Bendigo campus has prepared them to value, is the most direct measure of the campus's contribution to regional workforce development.

The campus's research contribution to Central Victoria's development challenges, including the research programs in rural health, environmental science, and the social sciences that address the specific conditions of Central Victorian communities, provides the evidence base that policy and program design for the region can draw on. The university's research connection to the community organisations, health services, and local government bodies of the region creates the applied research engagement that the best regional university campuses sustain.

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