Refugees can face many barriers to accessing higher education, including a lack of information, advice and individual guidance sensitive to their specific needs, inadequate provision of intensive language courses for academic purposes, and restricted access to government student finance schemes.

A growing number of countries are confronted by the challenge of demographic change and ageing populations.  These changes are most advanced in East Asia in Japan, Republic of Korea, China and Taiwan, so that the opportunities exist for other countries to learn from these experiences and responses.