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Day 208, Year of #Mygration: Is higher education for refugees a luxury? Hear the voices and stories of Syrian youth from Turkey

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Today’s blog comes from Dr Melis Cin, Lecturer in Education and Social Justice at Lancaster University and Necmettin DoğanProfessor of Sociology at Istanbul Commerce University. Dr Cin works on the IDEAS project (International Distance Education and African Students), which explores improving the equitable access and quality of distance education in South Africa, led by The Open University’s Professor Parvati Raghuram.  

 

 

Is higher education for refugees a luxury?

As the humanitarian response to the Syrian refugee crisis builds momentum, so many campaigns have been launched to welcome refugees despite anti-refugee sentiment atmosphere in Europe and so many options; deals and solutions have been discussed at global, transnational and national level. But, did we talk about refugee higher education? Have we ever thought that it could be a part of the response to the crisis? 

The Syrian refugee crisis is now in its seventh year and, as of 2017, Turkey is the country that hosts the largest number of people displaced by the conflict, around 3.7 million Syrian refugees  (UNCHR, 2017). Soon after the crisis erupted, Turkey has allowed Syrian refugees into the country based on the self-declared 'open door policy'. Registered refugees have access to free public services, including education (and higher education) and healthcare, although employment is still a big issue and relatively small number of refugees have work permits, which forces many Syrians to work in the informal sector in precarious conditions. Young people make up the majority of Syrian population; there are 529,387 people are aged between 19 and 24 (TUIK 2017), which signals that a half a million young people could potentially enter higher education.  However, the number of Syrian students in the Turkish higher education system remains at a very minimal level although Turkey allowed Syrian students to forego the higher education fees normally paid by international students in public universities. 

My colleague Professor Necmettin Doğan from Istanbul Commerce University and I have been working with Syrian students studying at universities to understand how they use higher education for public good, community welfare, as well as to advance their personal and professional development. Our concern was to look beyond the obstacles or difficulties in their access to higher education but to understand why Syrian youth would opt for higher education given that it would provide little room for economic benefits and may not necessarily be a way to exit precarious living conditions or informal sector due to the cumbersome process of obtaining work. In addition to this, we also wanted to challenge the dominant understanding among aid funders that higher education is a luxury for refugee populations and explore its great potential for ensuring that refugees have equality of capabilities for inclusion and participation, in order to create a more inclusive society. 

We also wanted to challenge the dominant understanding among aid funders that higher education is a luxury for refugee populations and explore its great potential for ensuring that refugees have equality of capabilities for inclusion and participation, in order to create a more inclusive society.

As we got to talk with these young and bright minds full of aspirations, ideals, future plans and who are determined to build a new life for themselves and their communities from scratch, the importance of higher education in their lives became more salient. The most astonishing role of higher education in producing skilled professionals to lead and deliver accountable and effective public services to address the problems of war became more visible in a refugee context like ours. Most Syrian youth expressed how the higher education they receive, the content, quality, discussions, were transformative in promoting and showing how the knowledge and skills they gain could be practically used in everyday life, to make small changes in their own lives and the lives of their communities, to work for the social good, or in the future when rebuilding their countries. Our conversations, casual exchanges and experiences as lecturers in higher education have shown a good deal of evidence that higher education is indeed not a luxury but essential to ensure that refugee communities flourish and become an integrated part of the society.

Our research also sparked a further question to discuss: Is there even an ethical agenda for refugee Higher education? The universities are increasingly adopting neo-liberal policies to keep up with the internationalisation efforts that often leaves the locals or the least disadvantaged populations out (in our case refugees), our research indeed shows us that higher education, despite all its tensions with society and development agendas, has still potential to bring transformative changes to disadvantaged lives. So, where does our responsibility, as citizens and agents of government institutions, lie with those who seek asylum, protection or hopes of better futures in our peaceful communities? Seeing refugees as people who are only in need of food, health services, and some basic level of education and ensuring that their fundamental needs are met is a form of creating sterilised communities who will never be part of the society or contribute to our society. Higher education is one way of accommodating those who live on the margins of society and transforming the socially perceived image of refugees as “passive, vulnerable and traumatised victims” into individuals with strong agency and ethical responsibility for changing livelihoods and envisioning a better future not for themselves but for their communities and the society they live in.

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