Global displacement: When the world moves, do universities?

When global displacement interrupts education, it takes away something that is genuinely hard to recover. The knock-on effects reach far beyond the individual – affecting employment, the ability to rebuild, and futures that extend to children and communities. For people who have had no control over what has happened to them, access to education is one of the few things that can give some of that control back.  

A question of fit

There are more displaced people in the world today than at any point in recorded history, and it matters enormously that universities find a way to respond. The problem is that most aren’t structured to do so. This work doesn’t sit neatly anywhere. It isn’t “widening participation” as that term is normally used, it isn’t traditional international student recruitment, and it isn’t an academic unit. It ends up in the gaps between institutional categories, which is part of why – despite genuine goodwill – the response can be reactive, inconsistent and dependant on individual champions rather than institutional commitment.  

Displacement and those affected by it is not something happening ‘somewhere else’, unseen and unfelt in the sector. It's arriving at our admissions offices. It’s in the emails staff are fielding and the support services being stretched. The standard access model wasn't built for this, and fitting displaced scholars into existing frameworks often means asking them to navigate processes that weren’t designed with their circumstances in mind.

Thinking beyond the scholarship – and beyond institutions

Properly addressing displacement requires more than scholarship schemes. It means working across the whole institution and thinking about the full scholar lifecycle, not just the point of entry. It means matching the response to the spectrum of need because people affected by displacement do not arrive at a single point or in a single form. It means co-designing with the people it is trying to reach, because there is no single refugee experience. And it means connecting to the University’s broader academic mission rather than sitting alongside it as a separate activity.

It also has to reach beyond the institutions – working with governments, NGOs, charities and local providers, and actively partnering with higher education institutions in the countries affected by global conflict and crises. That last point matters. This work is not about extraction or competition. Higher education systems outside the UK have their own integrity, their own priorities and their own futures. Supporting them to survive and function is as important as supporting individuals to access education. That balance is not always easy to get right and there is a genuine tension between offering support and imposing an agenda, but it is a tension worth sitting with rather than avoiding.

Building something sustainable as a sector

A number of universities are trying to address this seriously. At the University of Edinburgh, for example, this is what we are attempting through Education Beyond Borders – a sustained institutional commitment that brings together scholarships, fellowships, online provision, research, and student support across different entry points and routes. We are also a founding member and host of the UK Consortium for Palestinian Higher Education (UK-Pal), a new collective model that brings together UK universities to coordinate a sector-wide response led by the priorities of the Palestinian universities.  

Edinburgh is not alone in this – others across the sector are developing their own approaches. There is genuine and growing momentum in how institutions are sharing what works and building on each other’s experiences, for example as part of UK networks such as University of Sanctuary, but this is all still a work in progress and much more remains to be done.

A sector in transit

None of this is straightforward to argue in the current climate. According to a Universities UK survey of 60 universities published in October 2025, half of all universities have already closed courses to reduce costs – more than double the figure from the previous year. A quarter have made compulsory redundancies and almost half say they may need to cut student hardship funding in the next three years. Many universities are fighting for financial survival. In that context, asking for more can feel disconnected from the pressure people are actually managing.

Universities UK survey (October 2025)

However, the financial crisis and the displacement question are not separate conversations. Universities under pressure are being forced to ask what they are for and what justifies their existence beyond fee income and research metrics. The answer to that question should include this work, not as an addition to the core mission, but an expression of it. That opening already exists as the sector is in the middle of redesigning how it delivers education internationally, whether it intends to or not.

The economic model that UK universities have relied on for international recruitment is under real pressure, and the direction of travel is towards online provision, partnership-based delivery and in-country models. Much of that shift is being driven by commercial necessity, but it is also the direction that would make higher education more accessible to displaced scholars who cannot get here. There are also other factors beyond commercial pressure. As UK immigration rules tighten, the ability of displaced scholars to access UK campuses is becoming more constrained, not less. Online and partnership-based models are not just an alternative – for many, they are the only viable route.  

The risk is the redesign happening across the sector focuses on fee-paying students in new markets and that displaced scholars, who need scholarships, become an afterthought in models that could have been built to include them. That require institutions to make an active choice rather than assume that the benefits will follow automatically.  

Working across different timescales

The timing problem, though, remains real. Universities run on annual cycles. We have admissions rounds, funding decisions, committee approvals and academic calendars, all with their own deadlines. Even when there is genuine institutional commitment, the structures can work against you. Scholarships sometimes have to be arranged before funding is confirmed, committees have to approve activity that the situation already demands. This is manageable – and is managed – but it is harder than it needs to be, and that friction has a cost. Global crises do not fall neatly into these cycles.  

In recent years alone – in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza – each situation arrived suddenly, each required a coordinated response across the whole institution, and each happened alongside other crises that were less visible but no less serious. The result is that you are always doing two things at once. You need to react to what is happening now, whilst trying to build something sustained enough to matter beyond the immediate moment. That tension does not go away, even when the commitment is real.

From commitment to practice

Understanding what is needed is not the same as having the institutional will to build it. That gap between genuine commitment and structural change is where most of this work currently sits. Closing the gap requires something more specific than goodwill: dedicated resource, sustained funding and a team that sits across the institution rather than in the gaps between it. It means treating this work as part of the core offer rather than a response to crises, and making an active choice about who the new models of delivery are designed to reach before that choice gets made by default.  

The question for higher education institutions is not whether to respond, but what it looks like when that response becomes part of how a university operates rather than an exception to it