Higher Education
supporting Refugees
in Europe

The National Union of Students of Switzerland VSS-UNES-USU (CH)

The project “perspectives – studies”

A thorough analysis of refugee students’ needs and our possibilities as a national student union has brought us to the construction of a project that works on three levels.

1) We directly cater to the refugee students’ needs for specific information through an information website with national scope. (Projected to be online in November 2017)

2) We foster student initiatives on the subject.

  • We support and encourage local mentoring projects that accompany refugee students in the information, decision and application phase. We school the mentors in workshops to make them aware of the specific difficulties the mentee may face.
  • We support the projects through networking between student initiatives as well as with the professional sector (integration, migration, professional orientation) to exchange best practices and find new solutions.

3) We raise information about the number and background of refugee students. Based on this data we try to raise awareness in the institutions that can make crucial changes to the obstacles refugee students face (universities, universities of applied sciences, social services, confederation, cantons, etc.). We have already published a general analysis of obstacles for refugee students in Switzerland in German and French.  Based on the information that we collect about the projects, we give them feedback on where they could develop/adopt another project’s solution.

The National Union of Students of Switzerland VSS-UNES-USU (CH) Photo

Training workshop for mentors in Bern, brainstorming session. © VSS-UNES-USU.
The National Union of Students of Switzerland VSS-UNES-USU (CH) Photo

Press conference 23 January 2017 presenting our position paper on refugee student access to higher education to the press. © VSS-UNES-USU.

The combination of a concentration on providing information through an information website, collecting information on refugees for raising political awareness and fostering student initiatives that offer mentoring through networking, counselling and schooling workshops for mentors was created through the results of our initial analysis.

Many of the problems refugee students face when searching for university entrance in Switzerland are structural and the changing of these institutions requires long-lasting political lobbying. In our capacity as a student union, we therefore saw an overlapping of needs of the refugee students for information and personal support with our capacity of reaching local student associations and centralising information and political demands as a national political representative of students.

Impact
The project runs from December 2015 to January 2019, a follow-up project is to be designed.
Our project does not directly support refugee students but supports local initiatives and provides information. The information website is now under construction, so we cannot yet estimate its reach. About 150 students participate every semester in local auditor projects who work with us. The network of projects is continuously being built upon and enlarged.
Policy links
As a national student union, the project is intrinsically linked to the union’s goal of fair and equal access to higher education in Switzerland. The union’s politics in this regard is guided by the position paper and political demands published in January 2017. Available in German and French here.

We hope to work on specific policies regarding single demands with other institutions. The building of the website and the project network has, however, priority when our capacities are distributed.
Sustainability & Funding
The project is intended to build a network and information that is needed to support refugee students. After the end of the project there will be either a follow-up project that is able to uphold both the network, schooling of mentors and the information website, or these functions will be integrated in the union’s tasks.
The information provided is also useful for a broader audience of international students, whose countries are not part of the Lisbon convention or bilateral agreements with Switzerland. Capacity allowing the focus of the project could be enlarged to englobe migrant students and scholars in general.

Our initiative is funded by foundations and the union. As we are still building the network, the costs per student can only be estimated by the end of the project, at the earliest.