Chapter 9: Moving Forward – What More Can Universities Do?

This chapter offers an overview of four different ways that universities can respond to the ever-increasing need to open more educational opportunities to refugee students; to better support the refugees who are already enroled; to help refugee students to matter and to develop proactive supports to ensure that researching and working with refugees is ethical and underpinned by an institutional duty of care.

As we outlined in Chapter 1, the proportion of refugees who can access HE is disproportionately low, when compared with non-refugee populations (7% to around 40% respectively; UNHCR, 2023b). To this end, the UNHCR have set the 15/30 target, outlining five core pillars for achieving this. It is quite likely that the UNHCR-awarded ‘DAFI’ (Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative) scholarships will help to achieve this; these ‘offer qualified refugee and returnee students the possibility to earn an undergraduate degree in their country of asylum or home country’ (UNHCR, 2023h). However, while these scholarships are incredibly significant, resettlement countries should not be let off the hook. To that end, and in the spirit of creating more and new durable solutions, there are two immediate areas to which countries like Australia and the UK can contribute.