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Displaced students are often at the margins of the margin

Often overlooked and undercounted,  displaced students find themselves even more marginalized than many other minorities. 

In Europe, the Roma have long since been segregated or excluded entirely from public education systems. Many Central European countries, where the Roma have lived for centuries, enacted policies that saw Roma sent to the same special schools as those for the mentally disabled. Whilst this practice is waning, school attendance and completion remain low. Fewer than half of all Roma students progress to high school, with only 5% making it to college. Even fewer graduate. 

A major barrier to Roma education, in addition to systemic and institutionalized racism is language. Many Roma speak Romani in the home, meaning that children struggle with the language of instruction in school.

In Hungary, a state policy of language assimiliation for all peoples has enabled Hungarian-speaking Roma students to fare better in the education system than their peers in other countries, but this has come at the cost of their native tongue.

Another group that faces the language barrier is refugees. There are currently an estimated 40 million refugees in the world, including internally displaced people. Many of these children and adults have been out of formal education for many years as they move in search of asylum. 

Education services are sometimes provided by NGOs in refugee camps, but many refugees are not living in camps but in local communities of their host country for extended periods; the average length of time someone spends as a refugee is 17 years.

Estimates of numbers of and length of time spent as refugees are fairly accurate as the UN High Commission for Refugees helps maintain databases on people as they move across countries. However this is not the case for many other displaced groups.

Assisting the Roma can be difficult as there exist no accurate numbers. Given the difficult history of the region (Roma in Nazi-occupied countries were sent to the same extermination camps as the Jews), many countries now do not collect ethnic, race or faith-based data in their censuses, and even if they did, many Roma will opt not to be identified as such if possible. 

The number of undocumented students in the US higher education system is also difficult to calculate as students are unlikely to declare their legal status. Estimates instead are often based on those who declare themselves as resident non-citizens primarily from Latin America, especially Mexico. 

Their legal status means that they are unable to access state aid to attend higher education, despite typically coming from very low income backgrounds. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) can enable some undocumented students to legally work, but only for a two-year period. These financial struggles often mean that students can take up to nine to 12 years to complete a Bachelor’s degree.

Without a federal directive, such as the proposed DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, states are currently able to act as they choose. Some states have started to offer help to their undocumented students, whilst others actively hindering their access to the labor market and higher education, and others operate on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. 

For these students, often born in the US with no experience of any other country, the threat of deportation of either their families or themselves “is a lived fear.” 

The session "Students at the Margins and the Institutions that Serve Them: A Global Perspective" is being conducted in partnership with Educational Testing Service and Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions. You can follow all discussions on Twitter with the hashtag #SalzburgMSI and read all our coverage on the session page: www.salzburgglobal.org/go/537