African Refugees in Australia: Higher Education Participation

• In Event: Education, Social Mobility and Struggles

Proposal

For refugees, education can provide life-changing opportunities, including resources for effective integration with destination societies, increased employability, and active community engagement. Educational attainment is a marker and means of refugee integration (Ager & Strang, 2008). In this presentation, I report on the findings of a project that investigated higher education participation among African heritage youth in Australia. Theoretically, the paper is informed by the capability approach to social justice (Sen, 2009, 2017).

Qualitative and quantitative data sets were generated through semi-structured interviews, policy document reviews, and longitudinal statistical data mapping. The findings showed that African heritage youth hold high aspirations for their futures and benefit from flexible pathways to higher education. However, the higher education completion rate of the group remains very low. The low educational attainment of African refugees is, at least partly, attributable to early educational disadvantage, negative racial representations, and policy invisibility of refugees in general.
The paper is organised into six sections. The first section presents a brief historical account of Africans' resettlement in Australia. The presence of African heritage people in Australia traces back to the arrival of the first settlers. But until the 1970s, the long-standing restrictive immigration policy barred Black Africans from emigrating to Australia. Following the end of the so-called White Australia policy in 1973, Africans came to Australia under the country's skilled and humanitarian migration programs. The main countries of origin of African refugees in Australia are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia, Serra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan. This paper focuses on the higher education participation of people from these eight African countries.

The subsequent three sections discuss educational access, experience, and success among African refugee youth. Access is a prerequisite for participation because individuals must first have the opportunity and means to attend higher education before they can actually participate. African refugee youth benefit from policies that widen access through preferential admission schemes, alternative pathways, and broad course choices. Only a few refugees transition into university within the first five years of arrival. There is also a lack of targeted and ongoing support after enrolment. As a result, the group's successful course completion rate remains very low.

The fifth section highlights persisting challenges Black youth face in predominantly White Australian society. It covers four key themes: early disadvantage, policy invisibility, limited navigational capacity, and racial bias. By way of conclusion, the last section outlines the importance of expanding evaluative spaces of educational disadvantage to better address the needs of educational needs of refugees and other marginalised groups. Improving educational attainment among African refugee youth requires expanding the spaces for assessing educational disadvantage. An expanded evaluative space is one that (a) considers how social position and embodied dispositions interact to mediate one's educational disadvantage, opportunity, and outcomes; and (b) recognises differences in conversion abilities of equity targets in considering opportunity and outcome.

References
Ager, A., & Strang, A. (2008). Understanding Integration: A Conceptual Framework. Journal of Refugee Studies, 21(2), 166–191.
Sen, A. (2009) The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sen, A. (2017). Collective choice and social welfare: An expanded edition. Harvard University Press.

Author

• Tebeje Molla, Deakin University