Why displaced people are being failed by higher education

Worldwide fewer than 1% of refugees have access to higher education.

Historically, this statistic hasn’t attracted a huge amount of attention: before 2013 most displaced people came from countries where higher education attainment was already relatively low. That changed with Syria. Before the war, about a quarter of Syrians were enrolled in post-secondary education. As they crossed borders and later seas, Syrian young people requested not just asylum, but also access to higher education.

It is not only the educational attainment of Syrian refugees that differentiates them from other refugee populations, but also their access to technology: most Syrian refugees have a smartphone and some connectivity. This has not gone unnoticed by technologists, and the Syrian refugee crisis has accordingly attracted a certain kind of attention.

Hackathons focused on refugee needs, coding academies for refugee learners and apps for refugee integration have all proliferated. The impact of the culture of California’s Silicon Valley can be felt as far away as Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley – home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – where I once watched a robotics competition at a school run by a Syrian non-governmental organisation (NGO).

Disruptive innovation

In the education sphere, this has meant an increasing number of programmes offering digital education to refugees, as well as the adoption of ‘disruptive innovation’ models across the sector.

The accelerator has proven particularly popular in the refugee education space – offering mentorship, funding and support to early stage start-ups with a good idea in the hopes of accelerating their progress. I’m currently serving as a mentor in an accelerator focused on education in emergencies, run by IDEO and funded by Australian Aid.

The International Rescue Committee and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have both launched accelerators focused on refugee education. Accelerators are also increasingly common in universities themselves, which aim to provide students with ‘real-life’ learning opportunities.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I run one such programme, which supports young innovators from the Middle East to imagine and design technologies for refugee learners.

We spent January in Amman, Jordan, holding a workshop with computer scientists and engineers from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, working alongside MIT students to explore how relatively simple technologies might make learning more accessible to displaced people.

The ideas our teams came up with ranged from chatbots that help navigate foreign education systems to apps that used augmented reality to share notes between classmates who don’t fluently speak the language of instruction.

Outside the formal education system

As part of the MIT accelerator, in order to receive funding, we required each of our teams to partner with a local organisation providing education to refugees. Our theory was that by requiring them to work alongside an experienced education provider, they’d receive useful feedback and be forced to design for real users, rather than simply innovating in a bubble.

Notably, not one of our teams has chosen to partner with a government school or university. All have selected NGOs working outside the formal education system.

Part of this is just the reality of working with institutions: small NGOs often have more flexibility and the decision-makers are generally more accessible. But it also speaks to the unwillingness of formal education systems – even as they adopt the modes and language of ‘disruptive innovation’ – to allow themselves to be disrupted.

Despite the pace of technological development in recent years, neither the internet nor related technologies have radically transformed the provision of formal education at any level. We haven’t developed mechanisms for recognising the learning people do online.

Regardless of the expansion of digital education programmes for refugees, the vast majority of people who complete massive open online courses (MOOCs) already have degrees. We know how to disseminate content via the internet, but not other aspects of education, in particular, the learning community or certification.

Documentation

One of the most insurmountable issues faced by refugee learners is related to documentation: many left Syria without their full collection of high school and university transcripts, meaning that they have no formal evidence of the education they’ve already completed. While there are some attempts to find alternative means of assessing refugees' learning, particularly in Europe, the current innovation ecosystem has very little to offer on this front.

Most digital education programmes still require learners to provide evidence of prior learning if they want an accredited certificate.

Working with refugee students, one quickly realises how much of the societal value of education is the paperwork rather than the learning. We don’t have good ways of testing actual skills, and so we rely on transcripts and diplomas. It’s often the universities that are most resistant to technological innovation: to anything that jeopardises their credential monopoly and business model.

Until this changes, all of this innovation is going to remain largely at the margins – just as that 1% statistic is going to consign many refugees to life at the margins.

Genevieve Barrons is project lead at MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States.