HE for refugees means an opportunity for shared prosperity

For displaced persons, access to higher education can mean the chance to rebuild a career, contribute economically, and participate fully in their community. For universities, it’s a way to live out their public mission – not just by supporting individuals, but by shaping systems that are more resilient and contributing to economic inclusion and shared prosperity. – Bryce Loo, associate director of higher education research at World Education Services.

“Dignity” was the word Don Dippo used to describe what the Somali refugees experienced through participation in the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) development programme that he founded with fellow York University (Toronto) Professor of Education Wenona Giles in 2013 in the Dadaab Refugee Complex, in a semi-arid region of eastern Kenya near the border with Somalia.

“In the day-to-day life of a refugee there’s very little there to affirm your existence as a fully fledged person,” said Dippo. “There’s so much there that is dehumanising: standing in lines and waiting for this or that – and being fearful of what’s going to happen at night when the lights go out.”

In the BHER programme, “The students were reading books, discussing theories, and arguing about claims to knowledge. They said it gives them a reason to get out of bed. They met together in groups to discuss articles and to talk across gender, clan, ethnic and age lines.

“They were finding pleasure in the text, pleasure in the engagement with differing ideas; it gives them hope, an investment, for their future,” said Dippo, now an emeritus professor of education.



Between its founding in 2013, and 2023 when lack of funding forced its closure, BHER, which grew to be a consortium of York, Kenyatta University (Nairobi), Moi University (Eldoret) and the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), graduated over 450 students – 430 with undergraduate credentials and 30 with graduate degrees.

Academic sanctuary

For almost a century, since the formation in Britain of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC, now Council for At-Risk Academics or CARA) in 1933, a few months after the Nazi ascension to power in Germany, universities have provided sanctuary to academically displaced persons.

Among those for whom the AAC found refuge in Britain were the art historian Ernst Gombrich and philosopher Karl Popper. Princeton University famously provided Albert Einstein with an academic home, while the New School for Social Research (New York) welcomed Hannah Arendt, Eric Fromm and others.

Less well known are the 19 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), including Howard University in Washington, DC, and Tennessee State University (Nashville) which hired 53 Jewish professors who fled Nazi Germany.

“These HBCUs were struggling to find high-quality faculty to fill out their curricula, and they saw an opportunity when these scholars were desperately looking for visas to come to the United States and escape Nazism,” said Professor LaNitra Berger, past president of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, an art historian and director of African and African American Studies at George Mason University, who is co-authoring a book on Jewish refugee scholars at HBCUs with Dr Laura Auketayeva, a researcher at the United States Holocaust Museum.

“The decision-making process that these institutions undertook showed how they understood the complexity of the times they were living in – and saw that they could both extend a hand of assistance to these scholars while also using their expertise to help Black students,” said Berger, who is also editor of the book, Social Justice and International Education: Research, Practice, and Perspectives (Social Justice, NAFSA, 2020).

Such expertise included both “teaching their students the critical thinking skills needed to challenge white supremacy” and embodying through their own experiences the cost of ascendant authoritarianism, Berger said.

The cost of educating refugees

According to Francis Randle, Connected Higher Education officer at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees UNHCR), although about 7% of refugees worldwide are enrolled in higher education, once wealthy countries like Germany and Canada are disaggregated, the figure is significantly lower. For non-refugee populations, the share enrolled in higher education is 42%.

Among the reasons that refugees in many low- and middle-income host countries (where the vast majority of refugees are) are less likely to access higher education is that refugee camps are often in border regions, closer to refugees’ home countries and far from cities where universities are located.

Even if a country does not restrict refugees’ movements outside the camps, the cost of travelling to a university can be prohibitive.

While online courses reach more students than do scholarships, Randle explained, these programmes too are costly.

“If your solution is to provide higher education for the refugee that can be accessed remotely, there are particular challenges around lack of electricity, lack of computers, lack of digital skills, and lack of internet.

A university has to build in all of these costs to the programme,” he said. Learning hubs, sometimes powered by solar panels, can provide the technical infrastructure but are themselves a significant expense.

The recent cuts to USAID and other international aid programmes by the administration of President Donald J Trump have highlighted the precariousness of funding for refugee higher education, which, in turn, can undercut a refugee’s legal status in a host country.

As University World News has reported, 130 Afghan women refugees in Oman and Qatar saw their scholarships covering tuition and living expenses vanish when Washington ended support for the Women’s Scholarship Endowment (WSE).

Eighty of these women thought they had found academic refuge in the Middle East College in Oman, only to find that USAID had ended its contribution to that school too. Without these scholarships, some of these women face deportation back to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

While the American University of Afghanistan (Doha, Qatar) says its US government funding remains unchanged, reports that the WSE grant would be terminated have undermined the confidence of the students in their academic future.

“We came here with dreams and deadlines. Now all we have are fears of these dreams shattering at any moment since the US pulled the funding,” said a student who cannot be identified.

Red tape

Even before Trump’s return to office and the recent cancellation of thousands of student visas (and their temporary reinstatement) and arrests of hundreds of students (many for minor infractions), refugee students in the United States have had to negotiate the nation’s Byzantine immigration system with many visa classifications.

Some states prevent undocumented students from enrolling in public universities. Even knowing whether to declare you are an undocumented refugee can depend on a college’s unique regulations.

Nor is it easy for refugees or asylees to understand the complex application and financial aid systems or to demonstrate English language proficiency, which often involves taking standardised tests, notes Bryce Loo, research manager for World Education Services and author of the chapter “Integrating into US Higher Education” in Social Justice.

What is easy for American students – requesting their high school to send their transcript to a college or university – is almost impossible for many refugees.

“Universities, ministries of education, and other official issuing institutions often do not function normally in the midst of a conflict zone … In a slow-moving crisis, such as in Venezuela, universities may have simply run out of both money and personnel,” writes Loo.

In some cases, refugees’ home countries have political motivations to refuse to provide transcripts.

“In the absence of full official documentation,” writes Loo, “an admissions office can reconstruct an applicant’s academic history using oral or written information from the applicant (such as through an application, a written statement or an interview) and whatever documentary evidence the applicant can provide …

“If more proof is needed, the applicant’s competencies in their claimed field can be assessed using any variety of tools, including tests, interviews with professors, sample work, and so forth.”

Approximately 71% of some 165 Syrian refugees who came to Canada in 2016 and applied to college or university on the basis of their credential evaluation report were successful in obtaining admissions, writes Loo.

Loo also draws attention to a Canadian-designed sponsorship model that, rather than relying on government funds, sees students raising money to sponsor refugees, often by applying a small levy on themselves that is collected via their semester or yearly bill.

Wraparound services

Universities cannot simply go into a refugee camp and blithely deliver curricula or, if the student comes, say, to Canada, expect them to navigate the culture shock alone.

According to Randle, on a campus in Europe or North America, displaced students need “wraparound services”, such as access to healthcare, lodging, stipends, language courses in that country’s language and, of vital importance, cultural support.

A programme delivered in a refugee camp has to take into account the fact that, unlike a few decades ago, when the UNHCR expected refugees to spend approximately five years in camps, today they can be displaced for 20 or more years; one of the implications of this is the need to devise programmes that take into account the labour market that the displaced students will remain living in.

“How do we provide higher education that meaningfully has an impact on the lives of refugees? You have to contextualise the programme [in terms of content, location and culture]. You have to make the accreditation appropriate so that it is recognised where the refugees are,” Randle told University World News.

Dippo explained how a literacy course was reimagined to work in the context of the refugee camp.

“Literacy courses offered to future teachers in Toronto, for example, can assume that their students have access to a wide array of rich and varied books in classrooms and school libraries,” he said.

In Dadaab, where such print materials are not available, teachers must rely on alternative resources – from crates and posters in the marketplace to pamphlets produced by NGOs – and rethink their approach to literacy education to include a recognition of the contributions of oral cultures to literary traditions.

The ability of students in Dadaab to recite or perform long epic poems concerning family lore and their country's history – a skill no longer valued in Western universities – became an important part of the reimagined literacy curriculum, explained Dippo.

Value of refugee viewpoints

When speaking about displaced students in classes in universities in Europe or North America, Manal Stulgaitis, a UNHCR education officer leading on higher education, cautioned: “It’s never the job of a refugee student to be in the classroom only in order to give their testimony.”

Yet, she added: “When, for example, you are having discussions about international politics and someone says, ‘You know, I’ve seen this’, or ‘I’ve lived in an authoritarian society’ or ‘I’ve been on the move [to save my life]’, that lends a whole different dimension to the learning environment and the quality of knowledge that’s being circulated.”

At Bard College (100 miles north of New York City), Jonathan Becker, executive vice-president and director of the Center for Civic Engagement, teaches a course in civic engagement that includes students from Bard’s campus, some of whom are refugees, and displaced students in Myanmar, Thailand, Germany, Pakistan, Doha and Kenya.

After noting that “there is excellent data showing the positive effects of engaging displaced students in civic engagement”, Becker pointed to assignments that would not have been possible in a class with domestic students only.

In one assignment, he asked students from around the world to profile someone in their community who is civically engaged. In another, the students considered these questions: How do you make a contribution to your unique community? How do you navigate the challenges?

“There’s a dual beneficiary. The student from the United States is learning with and from people they might never have met before, who might have different views on anything from opportunity to privilege, education, gender, you name it.”

In one course, there were enough displaced Russians to form a separate Russian-language study group. The learning community became so strong, Becker said, that a student from Kenya asked to attend that session. He told Becker: “No, I don’t [speak Russian]. But I just want to get the feel of what the session’s like.”

Dippo tells a similar story about one of BHER’s first masters courses, which was part of a course he was teaching in Toronto. Save for a tutorial session, held at 5 am or 6 am on a Friday or Saturday morning when the professor was live with the students in Dadaab, instruction was asynchronous.

A few weeks into the course, a student in Toronto asked Dippo, “Can I join your seminar? I would really like to. I read their comments in the chat, but I would like to hear what they have to say in person.”

The following week, another student asked to join, then four others joined. Within a few weeks, there were 10 students in Toronto signing on “to hear more about what it is that they [the Somali students in Kenya] had to say,” Dippo told University World News.

An example of the difference – and power – of a displaced student’s worldview occurred, Randle explained, in a masters seminar at Oxford, during a discussion about individuals’ responsibilities to their state, when a student who had fled Syria stunned her class by saying: “I’m essentially stateless. I can’t have responsibilities with my state. My relations to it are completely severed.”

Her words engendered “a moment of reflection for everybody in the class because no one had considered that that’s how you could relate to your state or what the implications of that were”, said Randle.

Echoes of the past in the present

Both the UNHCR officials interviewed for this article and professors in the United States discussed the impact of the arrests and detentions of international students in the United States and the threat that displaced students in America now feel.

According to Berger, “the amount of uncertainty and chaos that has been wreaked on both our SEVIS [Student Exchange and Visitor Programme] and international students and the visa system is unprecedented.

“The effect on the students is not just a feeling. This sense of not belonging, that at any moment ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] or other institutions could conspire to forcibly remove them from their campus communities really impacts the academic mission and environment on our campuses”.

She added that the students at George Mason have been advised to keep their papers with them at all times and that as a scholar of African American history, she wasn’t surprised that the prisons to which ICE sent displaced students were the same ones to which the Freedom Riders (who fought for the right of African Americans to vote in the early 1960s) were sent.

“They put them in horrible prisons when they arrested them. They sent them to work camps in Mississippi and Louisiana. The parallels are there,” she said.

Bard College President Leon Botstein, Becker reminded me, was himself a displaced person after the Second World War, and before the war, Bard took in refugees, including Hannah Arendt’s husband, the historian Heinrich Blucher, whose name was given to the first dormitory I lived in when I went to Bard in 1976.

What Becker said of the precautions being taken for and by refugees and other international students on the bucolic campus, its hills rolling down towards the majestic Hudson River, could not have been imagined by my cohort.

“We are being open with them about what we can and cannot do. We are tracking their situation as best we can. We are advising some that we believe it is better if they do not leave the country,” adding that the college has made arrangements for some students to remain over the summer.

“We are being very clear on what type of documents they should maintain,” he added. He responded to my incredulous question, “You mean, at all times?” by saying: “That’s correct. We are advising them to keep their documents with them at all times.”