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ABSTRACT
Gaining access to higher education (HE) is a serious concern for refugees. Although studies on the integration and success of refugees in HE are scarce, the challenges associated with this issue as well as its international relevance are becoming apparent. The Success and Opportunities for Refugees in Higher Education (SUCCESS) project was launched to investigate the effectiveness of new online study programs offered through the Kiron Open Higher Education (Kiron) platform, the aim of which is to provide refugees worldwide with the opportunity to access HE. The results of the first project phase based on data from the enrolment process present an extremely heterogeneous sample. The students come from 54 countries around the world and are currently located in over 66 countries; their educational biographies and their language proficiency vary greatly. The described diversity, especially between the different current places of residence, and possible implications for practice and politics are discussed. The evidence from the SUCCESS project indicates that refugee students exhibit significant differences in level of education, and internal and external (pre)conditions and that the successful integration of refugees into HE worldwide requires new approaches to designing effective instructional and assessment methods.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. According to Hansen and Randeria (Citation2016), tensions such as a political divide permeating every EU country have been growing in refugee politics in the EU, that seems to have their roots in the general population’s fear of terrorism and concern for the economic situation (e.g. Wike, Stokes, and Simmons Citation2016) as well as the rise of right-wing parties due to opposition towards refugees and an anti-Islamic stance (Pisoiu and Ahmed Citation2015).
2. Bordignon and Moriconi (Citation2017) expound that management of the arriving refugee waves was mostly left in the hands of the individual EU member states, which in itself is inadequate and incompatible with parts of the founding principles of the EU (e.g. the European policy concerning freedom of movement).
3. Project website: https://success-eng.uni-mainz.de.
4. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the grant number is 16HLQ007; for a detailed project description see Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia et al. (Citationin review).
5. The following tests were used to access study related previous knowledge: TEL (Walstad, Rebeck, and Butters Citation2013), R-FCI (Nieminen, Savinainen, and Virri Citation2010), C-PA (Wagener Citation2013) and MC-Komit (Furnahm, Gee, and Weis Citation2016).
6. The missing data can partially be attributed to administration of certain items and, in these cases, classified as missing by design.
7. DEFF is calculated as: DEFF = 1 + δ(n – 1), (δ = ICC, n = average cluster size).
8. The FIML is one of the best procedures for dealing with missing values (Enders Citation2010). It enables us to gather non-biased parameter estimates under the missing-at-random assumption (MAR; Rubin Citation1976). For centering, we used group-mean centering (Enders and Tofighi Citation2007).
9. A complete list of involved countries of origin can be found in the appendix.
10. A complete list of countries of residence at the time of the onboarding process can be found in the appendix.
11. The International Standard Classification of Education of 2011 (ISCED 11) is an instrument that classifies graduating degrees into levels in order to make them comparable. ISCED levels 0–2 correspond to lower education, levels 3–4 to medium education and levels 5–8 correspond to HE (UNESCO Citation2012).
12. The CEFR differentiates between six levels of language skills (A1 and A2 are Basic User with A1: Beginner (Breakthrough) and A2: Fundamentals (Waystage); B1 and B2 are Independent User with B1: Advanced Use of Language (Threshold) and B2: Independent Use of Language (Vantage); C1 and C2 are Proficient User with C1: Expert Language Skills (Advanced) C2: Nearly Native Speaker Language Skills (Mastery) (Council of Europe Citation2018).
13. A fast internet connection is available if it is possible to participate in video calls without any problems.
14. An average internet connection makes it possible to watch videos without any problems.
15. A slow internet connection is too slow to watch videos.