Bridging the Gap Between Secondary and Tertiary Education for Students with Refugee Backgrounds with Bourdieu

Although progress has been made in increasing access at the primary and secondary level, only 1% of youth with refugee backgrounds are enrolled in tertiary education compared to 36% globally. Recent research suggests that tertiary education is fundamental in restoring dignity, security and hope for students with refugee backgrounds as well as preventing engagement with harmful fundamentalist ideologies. Given these potential benefits it is essential to better understand the barriers and develop initiatives to improve participation of students with refugee backgrounds in tertiary education. The main challenges faced by such students in Malaysia are a lack of information about existing opportunities, poor knowledge of the application process and insufficient soft skills required to gain access. This paper presents a case study of the CERTE Bridge Course in Malaysia, which was designed to address the above challenges and ‘bridge’ the gap between secondary and tertiary education for students with refugee backgrounds. Bourdieu’s theory of capital, habitus and field is used to explore the impact of the CERTE Bridge Course on participant’s success in achieving access to higher education. The research used pre- and post-surveys with each cohort to understand educational attainment, goals and interests and allow participants to self-assess development in soft skills. It is argued that the CERTE Bridge Course helped students navigate access to higher education by providing ways for them to develop social capital through improved communication skills and access to a network of sympathetic higher education admissions officers. Students also developed cultural capital and developed their habitus in a way that allowed them to negotiate access by presenting their skills in more recognisable ways in the field of higher education in Malaysia. Finally, the research highlights several immovable barriers in the field and identifies lesser discussed forms of capital, such as aspirational and resilience, as playing an important role in facilitating access.

In Search of a New Sympoiesis: A Review of Higher Education Admissions in Uzbekistan

Current comprehensive changes in the field of higher education in Uzbekistan have a potential impact on the overall enrollment in higher education. Rigid admission quotas in Uzbekistan are slowly conceding to a more market-based admissions and student recruitment to support reforms implementation. Cursory glance at the reforms fails to explain unprecedented growth of application numbers to higher education in 2019/20 or conjecture about future application patterns. Research presented in this paper aims to investigate the trends in higher education admissions in Uzbekistan through document analysis. It further draws on the effects of the government policy and legislation changes on the admission numbers in Uzbekistan and attempts to shed light on the future dynamics of student recruitment in higher education. The findings suggest that profound all-encompassing reforms in Uzbekistan have, firstly, precipitously increased relevant-age application numbers for 2019/20 academic year, but analysis suggests that this trend is unlikely to continue in the future.

Case Study 1: The Gratz and Grutter Supreme Court Cases against the University of Michigan

The purpose of this chapter is to understand arguments put forth by these social authorities (individuals and groups) in support and opposition to affirmative action within a prominent debate on affirmative action in higher education admissions. We are particularly interested in advocacy groups that have the ability and resources not afforded to most individuals to lobby the Supreme Court. We used the Gratz v. Bollinger et al. and Grutter v. Bollinger et al. U.S. Supreme Court cases as the site of the first case study. We look at how these entities deployed specific arguments and rhetoric within court documents to frame affirmative action to Supreme Court Justices. In particular, while all frames were considered, we look at two discursive frames prominent in the literature and how they were used by supporters and opponents of the policy: color-blind and threat frames. Findings demonstrate that while supporters often used color-blind arguments (and some threat as well), the opponent briefs were saturated with both color-blind frames.