Giving Compass' Take:

· Loïck Roche at The Hechinger Report explains why universities around the world should be doing more to help and support refugees, and how a European school is stepping up to the global challenge.

· How can college campuses provide support and help for refugees? 

· Here's how school can open the doors for refugees. 

Maria Alhakim has traveled a long road to get to the Bachelor in International Business in English track at Grenoble Ecole de Management in France. Her home country is Syria. Along with her family, she spent a year moving around, from Egypt to Lebanon and back to Syria.

Her parents have a deep history in Syrian politics. When the family finally received visas to come to France, Alhakim’s mother was arrested at the border and couldn’t join the rest of the family until a month later.

Even in France, the family remained split up for a year, with Alhakim and her parents in a camp in Pont de Cheruy and her sister at a French family’s home in Grenoble. Alhakim says she didn’t feel like she was even in France. “That is why I say I have been here since 2015,” says Alhakim. “It was the year we moved to Grenoble and started discovering this beautiful place and meeting beautiful people.”

Change begins at home. And home is a campus when you are dean of a top business school in the French Alps, Grenoble Ecole de Management(GEM). One of the greatest challenges I face in modern-day Europe, as a dean and as a citizen, is doing my part to help manage immigration. The continent as a whole, including France, has yet to have much success in helping migrants to assimilate.

Over years of conflict, 13 million Syrian people like Alhakim and her family have become refugees. About one million of them are in Europe, according to Eurostat and UNHCR and as reported by the Pew Research Center in 2018. Abandoning people in their hour of need is not an option. Education is one way to help people integrate and build new lives in foreign places.

Read the full article about helping refugees by Loïck Roche at The Hechinger Report.