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While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected both developing and developed countries, students from disadvantaged groups have suffered significantly. During the pandemic, these students not only struggled to access online education but also faced various forms of exclusion. In the post-COVID-19 pandemic era, this systematic literature review employs the concept of social justice framework to investigate the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education worldwide, focusing on the opportunities and challenges of digital transformation in ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality higher education. The findings suggest that while digital transformation in higher education has provided substantive benefits, its adoption has also ushered in challenges for learning. The review emphasizes that higher education institutions (HEIs), alongside their governments, bear the responsibility of mitigating the challenges inherent in the context of digital learning, thereby advocating for the implementation of comprehensive strategies that adhere to best practices and embrace inclusivity. By operationalizing these strategies, HEIs will be ensuring equitable opportunities and success for all students, while also preventing analogous challenges that may arise in instances of future crises limiting physical mobility.

This longitudinal qualitative study delves into the nuanced dynamics of postsecondary education access and choice for 23 rural Black students during their senior year of high school. Employing a multifaceted methodological approach encompassing interviews, visual data, and geospatial data, this research illuminates conditions that influence postsecondary education access and opportunity for rural Black youth. Results highlight how postsecondary education opportunity for rural Black students is shaped by local Black social networks, institutional contexts and climates, proximity to hometown, postsecondary education costs and affordability, as well as the intersecting forces of class, racial, and spatial inequities. This study also demonstrates how participants' meaning making of these conditions changed over time, thereby influencing their postsecondary education trajectories and decision-making processes. This research contributes insights into the shifting dynamics, meaning making, and forces that shape postsecondary education access for rural Black youth over time, providing implications for creating more equitable postsecondary education opportunities for rural Black youth.

The purpose of this article is to discuss how best to finance higher education in low-income countries of sub-Saharan Africa, drawing on benefits and drawbacks of the prevalent models of higher education finance, and lessons to be learned from countries which have seen greater expansion of their higher education systems in recent decades. Two main aspects are distinguished: first, a recognition of the powerful evidence that the general level of education in a country, its human capital, matters in determining a path to economic development; second, understanding that it does not help to produce large number of unemployed graduates whose only option due to absence of jobs is to engage in rent-seeking activities which in the end undermine both the essence of the human capital investment made, and job creation to be associated with human capital skills. Three areas are discussed, fully publicly financed \"free\" university education model; feasibility and lessons about fees; feasibility and lessons about loans. In addition, the paper makes suggestions on the measures to widen participation and promote equity and quality. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

In view of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ which began in late 2014, there is a growing potential demand for higher education opportunities amongst refugee communities in England and more widely in Europe. Whilst exact numbers are not certain, it is necessary to establish whether such demands can be met at all. Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with nineteen refugees and asylum seekers residing in England, this study explores refugee background students’ perceptions of the barriers to higher education and builds on previous research by including participants of varied ages, locations and study statuses — namely, aspiring to enrol, or currently enrolled in universities. While existing previous research provided extensive accounts of barriers to access, these were presented as separate issues, where in reality, these factors rarely occur in isolation. Thus, the analytical focus in this paper concerns how these different barriers to access not only accumulate, but also inter-relate and exacerbate each other, leading to what can be described as a super-disadvantage. This new term is proposed here as indicating the extreme degree of denial of equal access to educational opportunities experienced by those with refugee background, resulting from the added, independent effect of their migration experiences, status, and the socio-economic realities of living as a refugee. It is argued that this ‘super-disadvantage’ cannot be overcome without deliberate changes to outreach and support delivered by universities. These must be developed in partnerships with third sector experts and the refugee background students themselves.

While researchers have used qualitative and quantitative methods to study postsecondary education access opportunity for rural Black youth, the use of critical mixed methods approaches to examine postsecondary education inequities for rural Black youth is unrealized. The purpose of this paper is to highlight lessons learned in using equity-centered, participatory approaches to study postsecondary education access and opportunity for rural Black youth and to develop a critical, asset-based scale to quantitatively investigate postsecondary education opportunity and access for rural Black youth. This study is informative for researchers seeking to develop critical, asset-based measures and instruments, and for educators and policymakers seeking to attend to place-based and racial educational inequities.

The Sustainable Development Goals have galvanized efforts to improve access to higher education globally. While higher education has expanded over the last decade, access inequities endure, with economic deprivation, gender, and other dimensions of marginalization shaping individual opportunities to engage with higher education. Regional differences have also emerged, with some higher education systems growing at a rapid pace, driven by a variety of policy initiatives. This paper explores higher education access inequities in the Southeast Asian context, where a period of rapid higher education expansion has recently given way to complex patterns of access, against diverging national directions for higher education development. Using large-scale nationally representative data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), this paper traces patterns of inequitable higher education access in eight Southeast Asian countries over time. This paper then discusses country-specific policy initiatives, and the levers they deploy in trying to lower higher education inequities. It explores how these country-specific policy initiatives aiming at equality or equity in higher education access sit alongside periods of sector expansion and wealth-based gaps in higher education access, to conclude about potential policy shifts which may support work towards more equitable systems.

Multiple refugee crises are taking place simultaneously in several regions of the world. Despite the fact that large numbers of refugees are children and youth, research on policy discourse related to the educational access of refugees beyond remains limited. This situation is particularly acute in the USA even though over 3 million refugees have resettled in that country over the course of the last three decades. In this paper, we take a policy-as-discourse approach (Ball in Education reform: a critical and post-structural approach, Open University Press, Philadelphia, 1994; Discourse Stud Cult Politics of Educ 36(3):306–313, 2015) to analyze policies related to post-secondary education access among refugees in the USA. This analysis reveals refugees’ status in US policy as an invisible group, frequently confounded with other groups under the euphemistic umbrella term “New American.” Moreover, in these policies, refugees are represented as economic burdens, and their economic independence is presented as the key priority of relevant US policies.

The lack of attention to micro-politics at the household-level makes us miss the gatekeeping strategies that family members at the micro household-level employ to enable, and or hinder education access for children, especially girls. In this paper, I draw on qualitative interviews and autobiographical narratives of 15 women from matrilineal societies to explore answers to the question: How did gatekeeping shape gendered pathways to education access for women born between 1917 and 1957? Examining this demography is essential as it addresses the often-overlooked education access dynamics among women born within this specific timeframe in education research. This paper makes the case that a complex web of gatekeeping systems regarding access to education existed at the micro household family-levels in Ghana. Particularly in matrilineal societies, maternal uncles, maternal grand uncles, and fathers collectively acted as gatekeepers regulating girls’ access to education. The findings underscore the role of cultural resources in facilitating men’s control over family finances, breadwinning roles, and decision-making processes, thereby acting as gatekeepers limiting girls’ access to education. Gatekeeping access created two pathways, non-access, and access with conditions. Access with conditions explain how girls were restricted to reading courses typical to their gender and attending schools of the gatekeeper’s choice. These gatekeeping practices shaped the education access and life outcomes of Ghana’s pioneering generation of educated women.

Between 2008 and 2013, a hundred thousand refugees fleeing Burma/Myanmar’s civil war resettled in the US. In this qualitative study, we interview 15 1.5-generation Myanmar refugee-background high school graduates to understand their access to higher education (HE). Using a critical grounded theory approach, we ask what supports families, communities, and educational institutions provided (or not). We coin the term “double first-gen” to describe first-generation immigrants and college students. By analyzing family, community, and institutional factors, we move beyond theories of individual psychological “resilience” by interviewing participants who thrived and struggled in HE. We conclude that K-12 schools offer varying levels of support; that parents provide financial and emotional, but not usually academic support; that oldest siblings and those from single wage-earner families face higher barriers; that racially and socio-economically diverse communities or concentrations of Myanmar refugees are advantageous; that Myanmar refugee-background youth are less likely to ask for help than US-born peers; and that HEIs could offer a stronger sense of belonging to this population. We also discuss participants’ identity tensions, including varying definitions of success and responsibility, and US perceptions of refugees versus their lived experiences. We suggest how K-12 schools can construct pipelines to college and career that HEIs extend: create diverse, safe, and welcoming schools; offer college-prep, mentoring, and peer support starting in middle school; and hire college-level faculty and support staff who are first-gen and/or immigrants. These supports may also help refugee-background youth from other countries.