Does the academy care? Higher education trade media coverage of refugee and displaced students

This paper investigates how three leading Higher Education (HE) trade outlets – The Chronicle of HE, Inside Higher Ed, and University World News – portrayed students from refugee and displaced backgrounds between 2014 and 2024. Using keyword searches, we analyzed 393 relevant articles for sentiment and theme frequencies and co-occurrence. Our findings describe the corpus of HE trade media as overwhelmingly positive, yet concentrates on institutions and admission into universities. Other themes like individual voices, Global South support, and post-access outcomes (belonging, persistence, graduation) appear less often. These patterns align with a benevolent field-imaginary that equates opening doors with equitable interventions and reproduces performative accountability and North-led humanitarian narratives. We suggest that, within professional reporting norms, expanding coverage to include diverse stories would not only strengthen accuracy but also normalize more holistic practices.