Latitudes

A ‘landmark’ scholarship for refugee students

When a tornado mowed through Bowling Green in December 2021, Ataullah Tahiri wanted to help residents of the southwestern Kentucky city who had taken him in when he had been forced to flee Afghanistan months earlier.

During the clean-up, Tahiri, who had worked as a translator for the U.S. Department of State and for nongovernmental organizations focused on development and women’s and LGBTQ rights, found himself volunteering next to Miki Padgett, a former Marine who had served in Afghanistan. Tahiri shared his aspiration: to attend college in his new home.

Tahiri didn’t have much reason to hope that his quietly nurtured dream was possible. Although he had taken accounting courses back in Kabul, he’d been able to grab few documents when he’d had to abruptly leave as the Taliban took over. He had no money for tuition.

But Padgett knew well-connected alumni at Western Kentucky University. By the start of the next semester, Tahiri was enrolled at the college with the help of his new friends. Today he’s an honors student majoring in economics and finance and a member of Western Kentucky’s student government.

Tahiri’s story, and that of other refugee students, had an even bigger impact. Last year Kentucky’s General Assembly approved a first-of-its-kind statewide scholarship for refugee and displaced students. “It’s a landmark program,” said Jonah Kokodyniak, senior vice president for program development and partner services at the Institute of International Education, which has been helping Kentucky colleges build a working group to share best practices on refugee issues.

The $10-million Kentucky Innovative Scholarship Pilot Program, funded through the state lottery, supports students at public and private colleges. Campuses provide matching funds of 25 percent.

Kentucky might seem like an unexpected pioneer, but the commonwealth actually ranks fifth in the country for refugee resettlement, according to the Kentucky Office for Refugees. Bowling Green, a city of 73,000, welcomed nearly 250 refugees in the 2021 fiscal year and has been taking in displaced families for four decades.

“It’s a counter-narrative to a lot of assumptions people have about rural communities and refugees,” said John Sunnygard, associate provost for global learning and international affairs at Western Kentucky.

This semester Western Kentucky has 19 students enrolled through the scholarship program. Some came via the Qatar Scholarship for Afghans Project, which has been working to place students and recent graduates of the American University of Afghanistan, which was taken over by the Taliban, at American colleges. Others arrived on their own, including a journalism student who can’t return to her native Ukraine and an Afghan-trained doctor who hopes to earn a nursing degree so she can once again work in medicine.

Sunnygard and his Western Kentucky colleagues had started a task force for refugee and displaced students even before lawmakers approved the scholarship program. But the legislation helped knock down some stumbling blocks, such as allowing refugee students to qualify for less-costly in-state tuition rates.

The measure also required all participating colleges to meet regularly to discuss common challenges and share best practices. There is real value in colleges’ working together on issues of refugee and displaced students, said Colleen Thouez, founder of the Refugee Resettlement Initiative at the National Association of System Heads. Individual institutions “shouldn’t have to go it alone.”

Thouez thinks public-college systems are especially well positioned to take a “top-down, bottom-up” approach to aiding refugees because they can work as partners with federal, state, and local agencies and organizations, as well as with their member institutions. She said she’d like to see the Kentucky scholarship program replicated elsewhere.

The scholarship, however, is only a pilot, approved through the 2023-24 fiscal year. Backers hope the program, which also includes funds for Kentucky students to study abroad, will be renewed.

In addition to supporting the community of practice, the system-heads group is providing grants to campuses like Western Kentucky, which has started a peer-to-peer navigator program. It pairs refugee students with American-student mentors who can help steer them through confusing college bureaucracies, such as course registration.

Tahiri, who works part time with a local high-school program for displaced and immigrant students, also tries to be a resource for other refugees at Western Kentucky, offering them advice and free rides. “I am like the door that others can walk through,” he said. “This is my home now, and I want to be helpful in my community.”

A community effort to support refugees

Back in 2021, community-development groups in Brattleboro, Vt., approached the School for International Training with a proposition: Would the SIT Graduate Institute, which prepares students for careers in areas like intercultural education and international development, be their partner in a proposal to welcome “new Vermonters,” to help re-energize the region socially and economically?

The effort was timely: Within 90 days of Brattleboro’s October 2021 approval as an official refugee-resettlement site, more than 90 Afghan refugees had arrived.

The SIT Graduate Institute’s role was integral. The college had several years earlier moved to an online or low-residency model for its master’s programs, so its 200-acre campus became home base for the new arrivals, giving them a “temporary landing zone” so they wouldn’t have to scramble to find individual housing, said Tim Rivera, senior adviser for innovation and strategy at SIT.

Across the country, colleges stepped up to help take in the wave of Afghans displaced by the Taliban takeover. Institutions such as the University of Maryland at College Park and Washington State University, where there were fewer students on campus because of the Covid-19 pandemic, were critical sources of short-term housing, said Thouez of the system-heads group. The organization now has an agreement to start chapters of Every Campus a Refuge, which encourages colleges to host refugees on campus, at public colleges across the country.

At the SIT Graduate Institute, housing recent arrivals in residence halls had another benefit, making it easier to provide social services at scale. Those included English-language instruction — SIT has highly regarded programs in the teaching of English, and it quickly rallied alumni and retired faculty members in the area as volunteers.

While some of the refugees had worked with Americans and other Western groups, and had high levels of English fluency, others had never set foot in a classroom and were illiterate, even in their own languages of Dari or Pashtun, Rivera said.

Two years later, nearly all the refugees remain in the region but have moved into their own homes. SIT remains involved, providing English-language instruction and co-teaching cultural-education classes on topics such as how to navigate the American health-care system. A recent grant from a regional bank will fund financial-literacy training.

The college is glad to be a good neighbor, but Rivera said its refugee engagement could also enrich its academic work, such as giving students studying the teaching of English hands-on opportunities. “Our students can benefit from having real-world programs right next door.”

Additional lessons about higher ed and refugees

I asked Rivera and the others about additional insight and advice gleaned from their work with refugee and displaced communities. Here’s some of what they told me:

Unexpected, and sometimes seemingly small, hurdles can derail refugee students. Many lack transcripts or other paperwork. Refugees are expected to find jobs as soon as they can after arriving in the United States, so a promising student at Western Kentucky missed out on a critical advising appointment because she couldn’t take time off work, Sunnygard, the associate provost, said. It delayed her enrollment by a semester.

Colleges may also not be well organized to meet refugee-student needs. Responsibility for supporting such students often lies with international offices, yet they may not recruit in local high schools; as a result, displaced students can fall through the cracks in the admission process.

“Refugees are completely different than international students,” said Sunnygard, who has worked in international education for more than 25 years. “They didn’t choose to come here.”

Colleges can develop proactive strategies. The influx of students from Afghanistan put colleges in “triage mode,” said Kokodyniak of the Institute of International Education. But higher education can take the lessons learned to engage in long-term support for displaced students and scholars.

Kokodyniak said colleges could budget for a scholarship fund for refugee students. Thouez said she knows of at least one college that is considering making such students a priority in its multiyear strategic plan. “Historically, we’ve responded to emergencies as isolated incidents,” Kokodyniak said, “but where can we shift to make this a permanent part of our planning?”

Colleges can play multiple roles in supporting refugees. Much of the focus has been on directly enrolling refugee students, but colleges can play other parts, Rivera said. The SIT Graduate Institute is exploring starting English-language boot camps for students pursuing vocational training in high-demand fields like commercial driving and licensed nursing assistant. Colleges can act as employers or engage with refugee communities through service-learning work. A new private sponsorship program will let colleges directly sponsor refugees.

Colleges can also mobilize local support for those displaced by war or other crises. “Universities are embedded in our communities,” Rivera said, “so how can we use that convening power?”

Around the globe

The U.S. government will extend special student relief for Haitian students on F-1 visas who are experiencing economic hardship, permitting emergency employment authorization and reduced course loads.

In an otherwise gloomy outlook for American higher education, Fitch, a credit-rating agency, notes rebounding international enrollments as a bright spot for college finances, but warns of the potential for further declines in Chinese students.

The Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange, a quasi-governmental agency that provides foreign-degree verification, said it would end its Covid-era policy of recognizing overseas degrees taught online.

China’s Ministry of Education has directed provincial governments to halt plans for new university construction amid demographic declines.

Could Covid lockdowns make Chinese students at colleges abroad think twice about returning home?

Hong Kong universities are seeing a record exodus of students and professors, and declining freedoms may be a major culprit.

Students at an Indian university were detained after they tried to screen a documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A foundation in New York City will provide grants to help Ukrainian scientists continue their research.

The British government is considering expanding the number of hours international students can work each week to help meet employee shortages.

One in four students in Britain said in a survey that they were “more likely” to drop out of college because of cost-of-living increases.

Peruvian police officers raided a university in Lima to try to quell political demonstrations.

Half of all international students globally come from just 14 countries, according to a new data analysis by Studyportals, a search platform for international students.

And finally …

In India, a city of cram schools attracts students who are hoping to improve their scores on national college-entrance exams to get into a top university. “Kota is a place for strivers, where the fear of being left behind is palpable,” Mansi Choksi writes for The New York Times Magazine.

Thanks for reading. I always welcome your feedback and ideas for future reporting, so drop me a line, at karin.fischer@chronicle.com. You can also connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here.