Empowering Refugees Through Education
Children have become the face of the Syrian refugee crisis, but the civil war also has uprooted at least 100,000 university students, and universities around the world are working to provide safe havens so they can continue their educations.
“If they don’t have the possibility to be educated, you will lose that whole generation,” says Hans de Wit, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.
Not only will the Syrian students lose the opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills, their homeland also will suffer, de Wit says. “If you hope in the future to rebuild the country again, a whole generation is absent, making it very difficult for the country to rebuild itself.”
Educating Syrians also aids the countries in which they wind up as refugees, says Philip Altbach, founding director of Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education: “These people are a source of potential for the country to which they’re going.”
Before the war broke out in 2011, more than one-quarter of Syria’s 18- to 24-year-olds—350,000 students—were enrolled in tertiary education, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Now at least 100,000 of those students, along with as many as 2,000 university professionals, are part of the refugee population, according to James King, senior research and program officer at the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund.
“This may be the first time a refugee crisis is also a higher education crisis,” says Allan Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education (IIE)
