 Welcome once again. Let's talk about social inclusion. Has refugee students increasingly pursue higher education? It is, of course, crucial to understand their unique needs and their unique challenges. And so the study that we'll be talking about today of my guest, Janna Berg and colleagues, the study explores factors that influence refugee students' dropout intentions in pre-study programs, which, as you'll see, reveals an interplay of financial constraints, of perceived exclusion, and language proficiency. So as you'll hear, this conversation highlights the importance of tailoring educational approaches to address specific needs of refugee students in order to foster their successful integration, of course, into higher education. Janna, welcome to our episode. Thank you. So understanding, I think, Janna, the factors that contribute to refugee students' dropout intentions is important for developing effective interventions to this problem. So I believe this is the importance of your study. Yes. So when we look at refugee students, there is historically not much known about their inclusion in higher education. But higher education is key to build alive, to enter high-income jobs, and to create a perspective, basically. So we noticed that many refugees drop out of higher education programs, and we wanted to understand more about that, the more about the possibilities to support them and tailor programs to their specific situation. What was specifically missing in research that you wanted to address? After 2015, there was a huge push to support refugees and asylum seekers in German higher education, but there was hardly any state of research. There was a high practical insecurity how to address them and very little information available neither on the situation of refugee students, especially not in Germany, nor on the West to fully support their way into and through higher education. So we basically started with a very exploratory mission, and our main objective was to identify the key conditions for successful refugee student support. So Janna, let us know about the main finding of your study. So the study combines the findings of a quantitative survey with refugees and international students that are in Germany with a student visa who are participating in study preparation programs and qualitative interviews with teachers and course coordinators in those pre-study programs. And I think the main finding is that we found structural differences between refugee students and international students. Refugees are more often at risk to drop out. They are more often considered to drop out of pre-study programs because of some key challenges. And those are financial, their financial situation and their perceived social exclusion. Also female and older refugee students were at higher risk to drop out. However, refugee students also showed an ability to develop coping strategies against specifically mental challenges and perceived social exclusion. And in addition to that, our research also indicates a number of resources. For example, they more often tended to use the German language in their everyday life. They focused more on their social integration and what also helped was a strong connection to the perspective field of study. And those refugee students that had already made some experiences studying abroad were often able to productively build on this experience. That's on the student side and on the organizational level, the expert interviews emphasized a need for study and ample funding to maintain study preparation programs for refugees. And also teachers and course coordinators described a lack of professional training to support staff in addressing marginalized groups but also a lack of paid time to engage in individual student support. Much of the support that was done voluntarily and on an unpaid time which made it very difficult for staff to engage with a lot of individual students. You were mentioning the organizational level and I would like to follow up on that because higher education institutions can learn from these findings and implement some policies. Can you tell us more about that? About practical implications? I believe that our findings can be used specifically to adapt higher education policies as well as practices. Some key issues on the structural level would be to support teachers and course coordinators to be able to provide support to refugee students on the clock. That would be based on funding but also on professional trainings. But further, I believe our findings can help to adjust support networks by targeting the specific issues that cause refugees to drop out of classes. Some takeaways could be to provide informal language learning opportunities and precise social integration and support refugees in making use of the resources and resilience that they have. And academically, what's ahead of us now? More case studies, other geographies for example? There has been a massive increase in studies on the situation of refugee students which also introduced more international focus on the situation in very different regions. But I believe the biggest question for ongoing research would be how the experiences and lessons learned during recent years actually translate to the current situation. Because in our study, we looked at a cohort that participated in study preparation courses in 2018 where that started in 2018 and most participants were from Syria and Afghanistan. Since then, the war in Ukraine has caused many Ukrainian refugees to enter Germany and also public funding of pre-study programs on support for refugee students has heavily decreased. So I think I'd be very interested to learn whether and how universities were able to use their experiences to address the needs of Ukrainian refugees and continue their support of students with the experience of forced migration beyond public funding schemes. So I think a focus on refugees from different countries and regions would be interesting and also an organizational learning approach to investigate the ongoing situation in higher education. Some tips for future research. Janna, this has been a very straight to the point episode but if you could sum up this conversation in one or two sentences what would it be? So first there are some challenges for refugee students that cannot be addressed within higher education institutions. So I think supporting higher education for refugees should go or must go beyond higher education institutions and rather rely on networks and communities of practice. For example, the university will not be able to address the financial situation. So every aspect of life is connected beyond higher education. And second I think our research emphasizes that we should not remain at a deficit perspective. It's important to recognize the specific challenges that refugees face but I think we also should try to design support networks that build on their strengths and resources. Ideally refugee students should be included in the creation of their support structures. Thank you very much. Thank you. For those who are watching us on YouTube you can find all the resources all the materials of this conversation on the let's talk about social inclusion websites including the study that serve this base for this conversation. Alternatively you can listen to this episode wherever you get your podcast. You can subscribe to our newsletter on the website and follow us on Twitter at QajitatiuLTA.