A Qualitative Exploration of the Tertiary Education Experiences of Refugee and Asylum Seekers in Australia

Abstract

The world currently has the highest documented level of displaced people in recorded history. This includes a large number of individuals who are spending their youth as asylum seekers or refugees, which often impedes their access to and engagement with educational pursuits. Given that education has been shown to be a fundamental factor to facilitative resettlement and acculturation for newly-arrived refugee families and individuals, continued research attempting to understand the barriers to accessing education is warranted. This study qualitatively examines the educational experiences (with a focus on access to education) of 10 refugee and asylum-seeking students in Australian tertiary education using thematic analysis on semi-structured interview data. Six themes were identified from the interviews as barriers to or facilitators in accessing education. These are: relationships, emotional well-being, logistics, knowledge, instability, and financial hardship. The findings from this study add to a limited empirical knowledge base on this topic, and improve our understanding of the experiences of accessing education for students with refugee backgrounds. This is discussed in relation to its implications for institutes and policy makers.

Notes

1 A report by the UNHCR (2017) identified the top 10 country of origin for refugees as Syrian Arab Republic, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Somalia, Sudan, Dominican Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Myanmar, Eritrea, and Burundi. Each of these countries has nation-level scores high on collectivism, and this indicates that individuals from these countries are likely to have a collectivistic self-construal (see the Geert Hofstede Country Comparison Tool: https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/). As such, we acknowledge that not all refugee students will construe the self in a collectivistic fashion as we have described, however, we make these claims based on the evidence that the majority of refugees come from collectivistic cultural backgrounds.

2 We note that all advertising and recruitment materials were in English – this was for convenience since we were advertising for participants who were enrolled in a post-secondary course where the education was provided in English, however we acknowledge the potential for this to bias the findings presented in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the School of Psychology at Australian Catholic University.