Chapter 1 Asylum-Seeking Students’ Experience of Higher Education in the UK

Abstract This chapter is dedicated to presenting and analyzing the accounts of young men in the UK from an asylum-seeking background about how they experience a university. The chapter has been written with the goal of contributing to existing literature about how to promote an understanding about the active engagement of refugee students in higher education in the UK. It focuses on understanding the meaning that these young men assign to their studies in the UK, their overall experience of attending university, and the personal meaning that they assign to their lives in the UK. It explores the different personal and structural factors that they believe enable them to reach their goals – as well as the factors that they believe constrain them from doing so.