How do we make it easier for refugees to be admitted to universities?

Many reading this will be familiar with UNHCR’s 15by30 campaign to ensure that 15 per cent of the world’s eligible refugees are enrolled in higher education by 2030. Some widely discussed barriers to achieving this target include disrupted secondary schooling, a lack of academic certificates and financial hardship. Through our research with refugee students in Uganda and Scotland at the Refugee Law Project in Uganda and the University of Edinburgh, however, we have seen how university admissions systems also restrict refugees’ access to higher education. Here, we draw on our experience to suggest ways to improve the inclusivity and accessibility of these processes.

Admissions pathways

Our project in Uganda, supported by the Mastercard Foundation, involved designing, running and evaluating a bridging programme known as Foundations for All to prepare refugees and vulnerable students to rejoin higher education. As the programme progressed, it became clear that the only university admissions pathway accessible to refugees in Uganda was the Mature Age Entry Exam (MAEE). This route allows students over 25 to use their professional experience to enter university via an exam-based route, rather than use results from secondary school exams, which many refugees do not have because their education has been disrupted by conflict. 

To be more refugee-sensitive, however, this and other admissions pathways need to consider: 

Advanced warning of deadlines: deadlines for applications, exams and scholarships need to be consistent year-on-year and communicated with ample timing as refugees face additional barriers in responding to these opportunities, for example, constraints on mobility and unreliable internet (all university applications in Uganda are online). In Uganda, refugee students need to apply for permission to leave the refugee settlements to register in person for the MAEE. During our project, the MAEE was announced at short notice and one student missed out on the exams because he could not get authorisation in time to travel.

Accessible information: none of the universities that we worked with in Uganda had policies, guidelines or information on their stance towards displaced students, such as what fee category students would be in based on their asylum status, what loans or scholarships were available, what flexibility there was in terms of required documents, what language and counselling services were available, etc. Most worried that providing separate services might be seen as discriminatory or stigmatising, whereas our work has shown that it encourages potential applicants.

Waived admissions fees: even nominal admissions fees can be beyond the means of many refugees. The requirement that these be transferred online is also impossible for those refugees who are prohibited from having bank accounts in their host countries.

English language requirements: we found that the standard English language tests for university admission are often inaccessible to refugee students because they require highly specific preparation. We would encourage universities either to establish their own procedures for assessing refugee students’ English or to accept the results of assessment providers who adopt refugee-sensitive approaches.

Onward referrals: in Uganda, most refugees targeted the more well-known and prestigious state-owned universities for admission, despite the lower success rates. Universities at a national, regional and even global level could work collaboratively to signpost refugees towards respected courses and scholarships at lesser-known institutions to which refugees are more likely to gain admission.  

Registration status: universities should change the admissions pathways so that refugees are not forced to register as “international students”. This would mean that they are not charged international fees and that they are not competing for places against international peers who have not experienced displacement.

Flexible entry points: displaced students may have started but not completed their degrees. Where possible, universities should support refugees to be admitted into the later years of degree programmes so that they are not required to experience the potential frustration associated with spending time and money repeating courses.

Pre-admissions counselling: this would help refugees to choose courses that are more likely to translate into their desired employment and/or educational outcomes in a host country context that they may be unfamiliar with. 

• Resource collection: Here to help – the key tenets of student support
• A blueprint for supporting students affected by forced migration
• What can universities do to improve routes into HE for displaced academics?

Staff training

Across our work, we have seen that university staff find it upsetting and disempowering when they do not know how to support refugee students sensitively and appropriately. Alongside a desire for further training and support, the staff we engaged with suggested the following quick administrative fixes that importantly do not have major budgetary implications or require significant policy changes:

• Creating a university focal point for refugee issues, to provide expert support to refugee students, and to work to embed more refugee-friendly services across academic and professional services
• Capturing better data on refugee applications and admissions (for example, how many begin versus complete the application process and where/why there is a drop-off; whether there are differences in terms of gender, age, location, nationality, asylum status, courses applied to, etc. of un/successful applicants; what the conversion rate for acceptance to admissions to enrolment for displaced students with different characteristics is, among others) to ensure that they have the right services in place at the right times to support displaced students and to evidence the need for more funding and training
• Establishing a database of multilingual university staff willing to support displaced students
• More in-person outreach and support to refugees in camps, settlements, community centres, etc. in the run-up to the university admissions period, involving coordination and collaboration across universities and civil society organisations.

Longer-term change?

Our work on admissions in Uganda has also involved working with partners such as the National Council for Higher Education to consider broader structural changes. This has included discussions on establishing shorter accreditation programmes to assist refugees in acquiring documents that could then be used to help them (re)enter university. Universities have been hesitant about these sorts of alternative qualifications, voicing the sentiment that “we do not want anything to dilute our standards”. Our response here is to challenge the idea that the talent seen in refugee communities is any different from that seen in any other cross-section of society; it is often just much harder for refugees to practically evidence it.

Relatedly, universities questioned a focus on refugees when many nationals face similar challenges. This, we acknowledge. Many students struggle to join universities because their education has been disrupted, and similar reforms to those suggested here would benefit them too.  

Georgia Cole is a chancellor’s fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Martha Akello is a programme manager and Apollo Mulondo is an adult and community educator at the Refugee Law Project in Uganda.

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