From 1% to 15%: the fight to get refugees into higher education

For most of the last decade, UNHCR reported that about one per cent of the world’s refugees were enrolled in higher education. Not one per cent of applicants. One per cent of the refugee population of university age.

The latest figure is nine per cent. UNHCR’s 2025 Education Report puts refugee enrolment in higher education at 9% for the 2024 academic year, the biggest step towards its target ever recorded. It is real progress, and it is still very low. UNHCR puts the equivalent figure for non-refugees at 42%. The target, adopted by UNHCR and its partners, is 15% by 2030: the campaign known as 15by30.

This article is about the distance between those numbers. It looks at how the figure has moved and how far to trust it, what 15by30 actually commits anyone to, what the enrolment ladder looks like and where the rungs are missing, what the UK route involves in practice (fee status, sanctuary scholarships, foundation years), and why a charity that runs a two-week summer school for thirty people thinks any of this is its business.

How many refugees are in higher education now?

UNHCR has published an annual refugee education report since 2016. Each one reports a gross enrolment rate for each stage of education: the number of refugees enrolled at that stage, measured against the refugee population of the matching age. At the tertiary stage, the series looks like this.

Refugee enrolment in higher education, as reported by UNHCR

Global gross enrolment rate for refugees at tertiary level, by edition of UNHCR's education report

Show the data as a table

Refugee enrolment in higher education, as reported by UNHCR

Category	Value
2016 report	1%
2019 report	3%
2021 report	5%
2024 report	7%
2025 report	9%

The 2016 report, Missing Out, found that just one per cent of refugees attended university, against a global average of 34%. The 2019 report, Stepping Up, recorded “a rise to 3 per cent after several years stuck at 1 per cent”, and restated the ambition, set out in UNHCR’s Refugee Education 2030 strategy, to reach 15%. By the 2021 report the figure was 5%. The 2024 report, covering 2022–23, held at 7%, but only because the tertiary-age refugee population grew. In real terms nearly 50,000 more refugees had enrolled.

The newest edition, the UNHCR Education Report 2025, covers the 2024 academic year across more than 70 host countries. (UNHCR’s education web page describes the same period as 2023 to 2024.) It puts tertiary enrolment at 9%.

Three honest caveats

The jump is partly better counting. UNHCR says the rise from 7% to 9% is partly due to more data and better tracking in particular regions. Every region reported an increase. The largest, six percentage points in Europe, reflects data from a new regional education dashboard for Ukrainian refugees, launched in May 2025. More refugees are studying, and more of them are being counted.

The “1% in 2019” shorthand is loose. UNHCR’s own higher education page compares today’s 9% with “only 1% in 2019”. Its main education page describes the same change as a rise of six percentage points since 2019, which implies a 3% starting point. Both are fair readings of different editions. The one per cent is the figure UNHCR reported for most of the late 2010s. The three per cent is what the 2019 report found. We kept “1%” in our title because that was the long-standing baseline. The trend is the same either way.

The cuts are not in the numbers yet. The 2025 report says its 2024 data does not reflect the humanitarian funding cuts of 2025, and that their effect will probably show up in reporting in 2026. At the time of writing, we could not find a newer edition. The DAFI figures below suggest what may be coming.

For a wider set of figures on refugee children and young people at every stage of education, in the UK and globally, see our companion piece on refugee education in numbers.

The ladder, and where it breaks

Refugee education is reported as a ladder of enrolment rates, from pre-primary to tertiary. Set side by side, the rungs show a very particular shape.

Refugee enrolment by education stage, 2024

Average gross enrolment rates for refugees in reporting host countries, alongside the 2030 tertiary target

• Pre-primary42%
• Primary67%
• Secondary37%
• Higher education9%
• Higher education: 15by30 target15%

Show the data as a table

Refugee enrolment by education stage, 2024

Category	Value
Pre-primary	42%
Primary	67%
Secondary	37%
Higher education	9%
Higher education: 15by30 target	15%

Two things jump out.

The first is the size of the drop at each transition. Between primary and secondary, enrolment falls from 67% to 37%, nearly halving. Between secondary and tertiary it collapses again, from 37% to 9%. A young refugee who completes secondary school is, on the global average, still unlikely to reach university. The 2025 report also records a fall in secondary enrolment compared with the previous edition (42% to 37%), although UNHCR cautions that the reporting countries differ between the two years.

The second is how modest the 15by30 target is in absolute terms. Fifteen per cent would still be about a third of the non-refugee average. It is ambitious only relative to where things are, which tells you something about where things are.

Context matters here too. The 2025 report compares refugee enrolment with enrolment in low-income countries and in fragile or conflict-affected countries, using UNESCO data. At tertiary level the three are close: 9% for refugees, 8% in low-income countries, 10% in fragile contexts. Most refugees live in countries whose own young people have low university participation. At primary and secondary level, though, refugees trail even those comparison groups. And even at tertiary level, the report says, refugee youth face amplified barriers such as “legal status limitations, language barriers, lack of recognition of prior learning, and financial constraints”.

What is 15by30, and who is behind it?

15by30 is a target and a coalition. UNHCR and its partners have committed to the enrolment of 15% of young refugee women and men in higher education by 2030. It grew out of UNHCR’s 2019 strategy, Refugee Education 2030. UNHCR estimates that, based on 2022 population data, reaching 15% would mean roughly 600,000 young refugees in higher education.

The partners include governments, universities, foundations, companies and refugee student networks. At the 2023 Global Refugee Forum, the largest international gathering on refugees, UNHCR says 248 contributions were made on education. One of the three priority areas was reaching 15% enrolment in higher education. Organisations can still sign the 15by30 global pledge, which asks for new or expanded programmes, scholarships, policy changes and partnerships.

The practical plan is the 15by30 Roadmap, developed with more than 40 experts and organisations. It is built around five pathways, which are worth knowing because each has a UK equivalent.

The DAFI scholarship programme

The cornerstone of the global effort is DAFI, the Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative. The German government has funded it since 1992. According to UNHCR, it has supported more than 27,200 students in 59 countries since then.

The recent numbers tell a story of growth and then contraction. UNHCR said that in 2022 DAFI granted scholarships in 56 countries to more than 9,000 refugee students, nearly 1,000 more than the year before. In 2024 it supported 7,890 students from 54 countries of origin, studying in 58 countries. UNHCR describes this as the first decrease in scholar numbers since 2020, “reflecting the shift in global funding”. There was one bright spot: women made up 45% of DAFI scholars in 2024, the highest share in the programme’s history.

That fall matters for 15by30. In many host countries, UNHCR says, DAFI is sometimes the only available route into tertiary education for refugees. When it shrinks, there is often nothing behind it.

Why is the tertiary rung the hardest?

Four mechanisms do most of the work, and they compound. They apply almost everywhere, but we describe them here as they play out in the UK.

Documents

University admission runs on paper: a transcript, a certificate, a translation, sometimes an apostille. People fleeing conflict do not travel with a document wallet. The institutions that issued those documents may no longer exist, may not answer, or may be the very authority the person fled.

Recognition tools exist. The Council of Europe’s European Qualifications Passport for Refugees assesses the qualifications and skills of refugees whose documents are missing or only partial, using structured questionnaires and interviews. Those who are assessed successfully receive a document with key information on their qualifications, work experience and language proficiency. A 2025 Council of Europe survey of passport holders drew responses from 336 holders of more than 40 nationalities. In the UK, the usual starting point is UK ENIC, the national agency for comparing international qualifications. Our guide to overseas qualifications recognition for refugees covers what to do when the papers are missing.

In practice, many applicants are still asked for something they cannot get, and the process ends there.

Fee status and student finance

This one is specific, technical and decisive.

In England, eligibility for home fee status and for student finance depends on immigration status and residence, not on where you went to school. UKCISA’s list of home fee categories for England, last updated in March 2026, includes separate categories for refugees, humanitarian protection, stateless leave, Section 67 leave, Calais leave, the Afghan schemes and the Ukraine schemes, each with detailed requirements. Someone whose asylum claim is still pending is not on that list. As UCAS puts it, asylum seekers “are not usually eligible for either the ‘home’ rate of tuition fees or student finance”.

The consequence is arithmetic. The maximum home fee for a standard full-time degree at most English universities is £9,790 in 2026/27, and an eligible student can borrow all of it. International fees are not capped, often run far higher, especially for laboratory subjects, and come with no loan. Most people waiting for a decision do not have permission to work to pay them either. For a young person in that position the university door is not narrow. It is shut, and it stays shut until a decision arrives. That can take years, and by then their qualifications and momentum may have run out.

One more detail from UCAS is worth knowing. The “more about me” section of the UCAS application asks whether an applicant is a refugee, an asylum seeker or has limited leave to remain. UCAS says that answer is confidential, is used to connect the student to support, and is not used to set fee status. Students should also tell their university straight away if their status changes after they apply, for example if refugee status is granted mid-cycle.

Money to live on

Even where fees are covered, living costs are not automatically solved. Maintenance loans depend on the same eligibility rules. A young person in asylum accommodation may be moved to another city without notice, mid-term and mid-module, with a commute they cannot afford.

Sanctuary scholarships increasingly address this. Many UK universities now offer packages that combine a fee waiver with a bursary, and some include accommodation. The packages are real and they change lives. Relative to demand, there are also very few of them.

The map problem

The fourth mechanism is the one we described at length in our piece on the GCSE vacuum: nobody whose job it is to explain the system.

UCAS deadlines, personal statements, contextual offers, foundation years, the difference between an unconditional and a conditional offer, what a Russell Group university is and whether it matters. None of this is secret. It is simply passed on through a network of parents, teachers, older siblings and friends’ parents that a newly arrived young person is not part of.

How is UK asylum policy changing the picture?

UK access to higher education for refugees rests on one assumption: that a person granted protection has enough certainty about their future to start a three- or four-year course. That assumption is now in question.

In November 2025 the Home Office published Restoring Order and Control, a policy statement on asylum. Among its proposals:

• “Core protection”: refugees would get 30 months of leave instead of the current five years, renewable only if they still need protection.
• A longer path to settlement: no indefinite leave on core protection until a refugee has spent 20 years in the UK.
• A Protection Work and Study route: refugees who find work or start studying could switch to this route, with earlier settlement and family sponsorship.
• A capped route for refugee and displaced students to come to the UK to study, alongside a capped route for skilled refugees.

Some of this could widen access. A dedicated study route is, in 15by30 terms, a new complementary education pathway. Refugee Education UK’s January 2026 briefing, Asylum statement: impact on education, sets out the risks. Many courses need permission to stay that lasts the whole course, and 30 months is shorter than most degrees. REUK says it is “not clear” whether refugees will stay eligible for student finance if they could face removal part-way through. It warns that short leave will make housing harder to secure, especially for students who move to study, and that it could shut learners out of Adult Skills Fund courses such as Access to HE Diplomas. Its recommendations include keeping home fees and student finance, making it easy to switch to a student visa for courses longer than 30 months, and counting foundation, ESOL and vocational courses as study.

The routes that do work

Against all that, four routes have a track record. They are not interchangeable. Each suits a different situation.

Foundation years and preparatory certificates

A foundation or preparatory year is a one-year, university-taught course that leads into an undergraduate degree. It solves several problems at once. It stands in for missing school qualifications, teaches academic English in the subject, and puts the student inside the institution a year early.

For students eligible for home fees, England’s rules changed in 2025. Under Department for Education guidance, foundation years in classroom-based subjects, such as business and social sciences, starting from August 2025 are capped at £5,760 at most universities, and that cap stays frozen in 2026/27. Foundation years in higher-cost subjects, including sciences and engineering, can charge up to the standard cap. Access to HE Diplomas, usually taken at a further education college, are the other main bridge for students without A-levels. Our guide to Access to HE Diplomas and foundation years for refugees compares the two.

UCL’s Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate (UPC) is the version we know best: our advisor Raphaëla Armbruster coordinates its admissions, and one of our students took this route. The associated Bowman Scholarship, designed by Raphaëla Armbruster, launched in March 2021. It offers two students from forced-migration backgrounds a full tuition fee waiver to join the UPC, on either the Sciences and Engineering or the Humanities and Social Sciences pathway, and then progress to undergraduate study. Check the current terms with UCL before applying.

That student described the sequence in their own words:

I came to the UK in 2020 as a minor, and I had not completed high school, so I did not have a diploma. I immediately started looking for ways to continue my education, but there was no support for me, and I was neglected. I did not know what to do but I kept searching. A year later, I applied for the UPC Foundation Year at UCL, as well as the Bowman Scholarship. After passing two entrance tests, one English language assessment, and several interviews, I was awarded the scholarship and started my foundation year in 2021. A Bridging the Future student and Bowman Scholar at UCL

Read that again and notice what carried them: I kept searching. The route existed. Nothing in the system led them to it.

Sanctuary scholarships

These are scholarships for people from forced-migration backgrounds, offered by individual universities. Most include a fee waiver plus a bursary, and some include accommodation. They are competitive, and each has its own eligibility rules and deadlines. That is exactly the kind of information a mentor can keep track of and a student on their own usually cannot.

Three places to start. Student Action for Refugees (STAR) keeps a list of universities with scholarships for refugee and asylum-seeking applicants, plus an application guide. The Displaced Student Opportunities UK portal lets you filter current opportunities by immigration status and level of study, including foundation courses. The Universities of Sanctuary network, a partnership between City of Sanctuary, Article 26, STAR and others, recognises universities that commit to a culture of welcome. Our sanctuary scholarships guide compares several current schemes and explains how to write a strong application.

Access and bridging programmes

These are shorter interventions: summer schools, Saturday clubs, subject taster days. They do not give a qualification, but they change what a student believes is possible, and they produce the evidence and references that applications need. Ours is one of these.

Distance and connected learning

For refugees in camps, or in countries with no realistic route into a local university, connected learning delivers accredited higher education remotely. It usually runs through a partnership between a university and an agency. It is not a substitute for campus study, but for many people it is the only rung available, and UNHCR’s 2025 report credits digital higher education with some of the recent growth.

What each route solves

A rough score out of 5 for how far each route addresses the four main barriers

• Foundation / preparatory year5 / 5

  Qualifications, language, fee status via scholarship, and institutional belonging

• Sanctuary scholarship4 / 5

  Solves money; assumes the student already has qualifications and knows to apply

• Access / summer programme3 / 5

  Solves belief, evidence and references; confers no qualification

• Connected / distance learning3 / 5

  Solves access where nothing else exists; weaker on networks

Show the data as a table

What each route solves

Category	Value
Foundation / preparatory year	5 / 5
Sanctuary scholarship	4 / 5
Access / summer programme	3 / 5
Connected / distance learning	3 / 5

What a UK application year actually looks like

The routes above are abstract until they are laid against a calendar. Here is the shape of a year for a young person aiming at a September start, with the pressure points marked. Exact dates change every cycle, so check UCAS and each university.

Three of those rows are worth dwelling on.

Confirming fee status in writing, early. This is the most important piece of admin in the whole year, and the one most often left until it is urgent. A university normally assesses fee status from documents. That assessment can take weeks, can be queried, and decides whether the course is affordable at all. Starting the conversation in November rather than June is the difference between a question answered and a door closed.

Mock interviews. For competitive courses such as medicine, dentistry and the Oxbridge subjects, the interview is a large part of the decision, and interview technique can be learned. Families who can afford it pay for this preparation. A student without that network arrives cold. Our mentoring scheme runs mock interviews for STEM degrees, including medical school and Oxbridge, precisely because our volunteers can offer them for free.

The second cycle. A student who gets in on a second attempt rather than the first has not failed. A second attempt is often what happens when the first year is spent discovering that a route exists.

Where a small charity fits

We are honest about our scale. We run a free two-week STEM and English summer school with 30 places a year at UCL’s Department of Physics & Astronomy. Since 2022 our online mentoring scheme has supported 32 students with more than 250 hours of volunteer mentoring. Against a global target measured in hundreds of thousands, that is a rounding error.

But the ladder metaphor is useful here, because rungs are local. Nobody climbs a global average. They climb from where they are to the next reachable place. For a sixteen-year-old in London, the next rung up is not “tertiary enrolment”. It is a person who has done it, telling them how.

That is the rung we build.

Our mentors help with homework and coursework, but the parts they mention most often are really about the map:

Our volunteer mentors go the extra mile to help mentees pursue their goals, by helping them with CVs, cover letters and university applications.

Mentoring is weekly, one-to-one or in small groups, across STEM, IT and English, and it includes personal statements and mock interviews. That preparation is otherwise something families pay for. Our piece on what STEM mentoring actually involves describes a typical week, and the next cycle starts in October 2026. For students further along, our new work placements and internships programme adds the experience that strengthens both applications and CVs.

The number that stays with us

Of everything in this article, the figure we return to is not the nine per cent or the fifteen per cent. It is 315.

That is how many applications we received in 2025 for thirty places on a free two-week summer school. More than ten young people for every place, each of whom found us, filled in the forms and planned their August around a programme they had never attended, on the chance that it might help. We wrote about that year in ten times demand.

The demand is not the problem. The demand is the evidence.

What would 15% by 2030 actually take?

Reaching fifteen per cent is not a matter of persuading more refugees to apply. It needs four separate systems to change, and they are not the same systems in every country.

Qualification recognition at scale. Not a one-off process for each applicant, but a default: an assessment route that assumes documents are missing and tests competence instead. The European Qualifications Passport for Refugees shows this works. What is missing is reach, and awareness among admissions teams.

Separating study from immigration status. This is the hardest change and the one that matters most. Every year a young person waits for a decision, their qualifications age and their momentum fades. Where people can study at a home fee rate while their claim is pending, the waiting time becomes useful. Where they cannot, it is dead time. Scotland’s category for young asylum seekers shows that a UK nation can make this choice. Shorter periods of refugee leave push the other way, unless study routes are built to last as long as courses do.

Funded places, at a scale that matches demand. Sanctuary scholarships work. There are dozens where thousands are needed. Globally, DAFI’s first fall in scholar numbers since 2020 shows the risk of relying on a few funders. This is a budget question rather than a design question, which makes it simpler to describe and harder to solve.

Guidance as infrastructure. The cheapest of the four, and the one volunteers can do most for. Every organisation supporting refugees, every college and every local authority could name one person whose job includes knowing the routes into higher education. Most cannot. The point of a named adviser for young people in care or in the asylum system is not that they do anything clever. It is that somebody is holding the map.

It also helps when bridging years are attached to the university a student will move on to, rather than to a separate college. A foundation year inside the destination institution closes the qualification gap, the academic English gap and the belonging gap all at once, and it produces an internal reference.

What we would ask of a reader

If you work in a university, the most valuable thing you can do is fund a scholarship that covers living costs, and run a fee-status process that answers quickly.

If you work with young people, it is saying the words “foundation year” and “sanctuary scholarship” out loud, early, to someone who has never heard them. Our guide for professionals supporting a young refugee into education is a practical place to start.

If you have been through a UK university application, it is a regular hour from October to March. That is the whole of our mentoring scheme, and it is the rung nobody else builds.

If you are a young person reading this, three things are worth knowing. Foundation and preparatory years exist, and they are designed for students with missing school qualifications. Many UK universities run sanctuary scholarships. And our free summer school at UCL is open to 16 to 22 year olds from refugee, asylum-seeking and forced-migrant backgrounds, with travel, food and materials covered. Summer School 2027 applications will be announced on our application page.

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First compiled January 2026; updated September 2026 with UNHCR’s 2025 Education Report (academic year 2024), DAFI’s 2024 figures, UKCISA’s March 2026 fee categories, 2026/27 English fee caps and the November 2025 asylum policy statement. Rules and figures change. Check GOV.UK and UKCISA, take specialist advice on an individual case, and if you spot something out of date, please tell us. Our own figures come from Bridging the Future programme records.

Keep reading

• Sanctuary scholarships in the UK: who they are for, what they cover and how to apply.
• Home fees and student finance for refugees and asylum seekers: the fee-status rules in detail.
• Access to HE Diplomas and foundation years: the two main bridges into a degree.
• The GCSE vacuum: the barriers that stop displaced 16-year-olds before university is even in view.