Conference Agenda

Equity in student outcomes is a concern of many higher education (HE) systems around the world. In the UK, the Ethnicity Degree Awarding Gap (EDAG) has been a persistent problem in HE for many years (Advance HE, 2023). EDAG refers to the difference in rates of achieving a good undergraduate degree, i.e., a first or upper-second class degree among various ethnic and/or racial groups. Usually, the comparison is between UK domiciled white students versus Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students (BAME, a contested term, yet often used in statistics and policy language). As a whole, white students tend to do better than minority racialised students, with 83.0% of White students graduating in 2021/22 receiving a good class degree, and only 72.3% of BAME students achieving the same, a gap of 10.7 percentage points (ppts) (Advance HE, 2023).

The EDAG has gained significance in policy and research, particularly as, beyond social justice arguments, a good class degree can lead to good employment, facilitate access to further education and form the basis for the academic pipeline (i.e., enabling progression into academic careers). In 2018 the Office for Students (OfS), the sector regulator for English HE, set ambitious targets for universities to close what the OfS refers to as an ‘unexplained’ gap between white and Black students by 2024/25 and the absolute gap, which includes ‘structural and unexplained factors’ by 2030/31 (OfS, 2018, p. 4). By structural factors the OfS means ‘entry qualification, subject of study, age of students, and the provider at which a student studies’, while the ‘unexplained factors’ are those that cannot be explained by the above (OfS, 2018, p. 12). Higher education institutions (HEIs) have been explicating their work and targets for closing the EDAG in Access and Participation Plans (APPs). APPs are documents that the OfS requires HEIs to produce as part of their condition for registration as an HE provider in England, where they demonstrate how they will guarantee equality of opportunities for students.

The EDAG has been described as a ‘wicked problem’, one which is multi-faceted and difficult to tackle and requires concerted efforts to address (Shakir, 2024). While the literature on the topic has flourished in recent years, it has yet to translate into closing the gap fully. This has led us to interrogate the evidence base for what works in closing the EDAG, by undertaking three-part desk-based research.

Ethnic inequalities in students’ experiences and outcomes in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) remain a persistent societal challenge across OECD countries, particularly in migration-diverse contexts such as Flanders, Belgium (OECD, 2019). One important, yet still insufficiently understood, outcome of these inequalities concerns students’ intentions to drop out of higher education. Drawing on sociological (e.g., Bean, 1980) and psychological models of student persistence (Bean & Eaton, 2000), situated within an educational perspective (e.g., Braxton, 2020), this study approaches dropout intentions as the result of an interaction between students and institutional contexts, rather than as an individual failure (e.g., Behr et al., 2020).

Previous research consistently shows that students from ethnic minoritized backgrounds report lower levels of belonging compared to their ethnic majority peers (e.g., Fleischmann et al., 2011; Banerjee & Bender, 2022). This is particularly concerning given that sense of belonging – conceptualized here as the students’ perception of being valued, respected, and able to be oneself within the academic environment – is consistently linked to academic success (Korpershoek et al., 2020). However, less is known about how belonging helps explain differences in dropout intentions, especially within highly accessible higher education systems.

The objective of this study is therefore to map the dropout intentions of ethnic minority students and assess how their sense of belonging influences these intentions compared to majority peers. The study addresses two central research questions: (1) Is there an ethnic gap in dropout intentions among first-year students in Flemish higher education? and (2) To what extent does sense of belonging help explain potential differences in dropout intentions?

From an anti-deficit perspective, demographic characteristics are approached as indicators of students’ broader social and cultural positioning within higher education, rather than as individual deficits. Because students’ positioning is shaped by multiple, interrelated background characteristics, the study adopts an intersectional approach with particular attention to ethnic background, linguistically minoritzed relational practices (i.e. lower levels of the majority (Dutch) language use across social relationships) and socioeconomic status.

The first research question (RQ1) examines the extent to which students' background characteristics predict student dropout intentions. Building on existing literature, it is expected that students from ethnic minoritized backgrounds will, on average, report higher dropout intentions than their ethnic majority peers, reflecting unequal institutional experiences rather than individual limitations. The second research question (RQ2) investigates the mediating role of sense of belonging in the relationship between students’ background characteristics and dropout intentions, proposing that lower sense of belonging is associated with higher dropout intentions, particularly among students positioned at the intersection of ethnic minoritization and lower socioeconomic status.

Context of the study
This study is situated within the Flemish higher education system, which is characterised as a universal system (Trow, 2007) with open access to anyone who chooses to enrol with minimal criteria. In Flanders nearly all bachelor programmes are open, tuition fees are relatively low, and the higher education structure is flexible allowing students to move between academic and professional tracks. Despite this accessibility, persistent inequalities in students’ academic trajectories and outcomes remain.

Higher Education holds a significant role in many countries, including European ones – both for the individuals who access their institutions and for society writ large. Yet access to and full participation in Higher Education Institutions are restricted through policies, practices, and norms. Worldwide, refugee access to higher education is 9% (UNESCO, 2025). In Australia, where our study is based, the numbers reflect the global trends, though recent changes in policy and practice have seen a slight increase in numbers (Baak et al. 2025).

Even with access increasing, there remain significant questions as to the quality of the university experience of refugee students once they are admitted. Full participation in universities requires more than access. It requires epistemic justice – the capacity for students to access and contribute to knowledge and see their ways of knowing reflected and valued (Fricker, 2007). An important way to understand epistemic (in)justice is through the lived experience of refugee and asylum-seeking students themselves.

This paper draws on an Australian longitudinal study designed to follow the typical student journey from initial entry to completion of a bachelor’s programme. The study began in 2018, with 22 first-year students from asylum-seeking backgrounds in seven Australian tertiary institutions. The international research team includes two researchers based in Australia, one in Canada, one in the UK and two in Finland. We collected data annually using semi-structured qualitative interviews at three points in the students’ higher education journey. First interviews provided an understanding of the students’ experiences of getting into university, while the second-wave interviews explored the students’ experiences in the middle of their Bachelor programme. The third-wave interviews allowed students to reflect on the experience near the completion of their studies. Wave four interviews checked in with students wherever they were – continuing education, in employment, or otherwise – and continued the reflection on their university years and their experiences transitioning out of university.

Through listening to the lived experiences of the participants in our study, the exclusionary system within which they were operating becomes quite clear. Government and institutional policies and practices often failed to recognise the unique needs of this distinct group. Refugee and asylum-seeking students: were classified as international students; fell through the institutional cracks in terms of material and economic services; were vulnerable to visa or status changes; were restricted in their mobility; and sometimes felt their position too precarious to advocate for themselves.

In this paper, we shift from examining these tangible forms of exclusion to exploring how refugee and asylum-seeking students in our study experienced exclusion, and at times inclusion, as holders of knowledge. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, we pose the research questions: How were these students disadvantaged by unjust assumptions about their capacity as knowers? And how did they face further challenges in making sense of their social experiences within Australian universities?

Fricker originally identified two primary forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice arises when prejudice against a person impacts on how their word is received, i.e., whether others believe what someone says and acknowledge what they know. In other words, testimonial injustice means that credibility is unfairly diminished because of who the speaker is. Hermeneutical injustice, in turn, means that people have a gap in their collective interpretive resources that prevents someone from making sense of their own social experience. It is about the absence of language or shared understanding that would make it possible to communicate an experienced injustice, or an experience in general. Although we found evidence of both forms of epistemic injustice being experienced by our participants, hermeneutical injustice was most prominent.