The present study examines strategies that multilingual university students in Rwanda use in order to successfully deal with complex academic material offered through the medium of English, a foreign language. The reported strategies emerged from group work discussions and interviews with students in the faculty of Economics and Management at a University in Rwanda. The data were analyzed thematically. Findings reveal that students have multiple coping strategies that enable them to complete academic tasks given through the medium of English. One of the prominent strategies and practices is the successful use of other languages at their disposal to mediate cognitively demanding academic tasks. Although other spoken languages are not officially recognised as media of instruction in higher education, they play a mediating role in content learning through responsible code switching and translanguaging.

Before 1994, Rwanda education policy knew some selection barriers to access tertiary education.Thereafter, it liberated the access allowing many higher private learning institutions to open their doors. This paper analyzed late tertiary education impact on mature women students. The impact regards acquired knowledge, skills and capacity that boosted their voice equity to better perform at workplace than before. The research embarked on Bandura's [1] social learning theory (or social cognition theory) that proves how people with high self-efficacy master their feelings and thoughts, are self-directed and motivated to accomplish their targets. The study followed a qualitative approach including interviews with 18 mature women and 104 who filled the questionnaires. All the participants were in fourth year, between the ages of 30-45 and selected from five higher private and public learning institutions but following different programmes. The findings show that their self-efficacy beliefs as a social cognition construct empowered their capacity to perform specific duties through personal goal setting. Further, tertiary education, from the majority of their views and perceptions, increased their self-esteem and trust, rendered them effective human capital in their day-to-day duties, enhanced their personal fulfillment and awakened them to be more participative in different social, political, economic spheres etc.. In addition, they learned to link challenging goals of studying to strong commitment of being good performers at work, raising confidence in colleagues, employers, neighbors and avoiding failures but creating attitudes of serenity and scrutiny to approach difficult situations.