Educational Aspiration And Post College Reality: A Mixed Methods Study Of The Lost Boys And Girls Of Sudan’s Post College Career, Socioeconomic, And Social Status Outcomes

Separated from their families by the Sudanese Civil War in 1987, the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan spent their formative lives in the refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya for 13 years before they resettled in the United States in the 2000s. In these camps, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) educated them from primary to secondary grades through the Education in Emergencies (EIE) program (Monaghan, 2019). The Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan perceived education as their gateway to a better future and most continued on to pursue a college education upon resettling in the US. Prior studies such as that of Bates, Johnson, and Rana (2013) which focused on the Lost Boys of Sudan’s resilience concluded that this group valued education above everything else. However, these authors did not investigate the relationship between their college education and their post college career, socioeconomic, and social status outcomes.I addressed this gap in the following mixed methods study by examining the post college career, socioeconomic, and social status outcomes of the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan who had resettled in the United States since the early 2000’s and acquired at least a bachelor’s degree from an American college or university. I asked a three-part question in this study. 1) What are the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan’s post college career, socioeconomic, and social status outcomes? 2) What do the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan make of their post college career, socioeconomic, and social status outcomes? 3) How do the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan perceive the ways in which the contextual factors and intersecting minority identities have shaped their post college career, socioeconomic, and social status outcomes? I found that when education was combined with the right support system the post college career, socioeconomic, and social status outcomes of the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan were improved. All the participants valued the role of education in their lives above everything else and believed education had helped or would help them to achieve their lifetime goals. Most of them attributed their career, socioeconomic, and social status successes to their education supported by career support resources that enabled their progress, and intentional navigation of systemic oppression stemming from their intersecting identities related to immigration, language, racial, or ethnic status. This study helped to illuminate these outcomes and has the potential to generate more intentional policy implications for supporting the educational opportunities of the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan and possibly other individuals with refugee and immigrant experiences who aspire to succeed in their post college career pursuits in a United States and global professional context. Overall, conducting a mixed methods research design helped to give nuance to data from the intersecting lenses of a quantitative and qualitative perspective. As such, the outcomes described a more subtle view of the experiences of the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan generating more insights for future studies on more representative samples of the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan and other immigrant and refugee populations.