‘Most Challenging? To Fit in with People While Remaining Myself.’ Social Integration of Second Generation Turks within the Dutch Higher Education Setting

Abstract

By focusing on second generation Turks in the Netherlands the paper aims to study the role of friends and peers in terms of 'fitting in' to a higher education setting. In-depth interviews with Turkish higher education students and recent graduates confirm the existence of certain 'coping strategies' which ethnic minority students employ in order to integrate into the social fabric of their university or college. Social integration is usually achieved through joining existing networks of ethnic minority students, creating new networks, or simply, keeping 'old' high school friends throughout university. However, in some cases students are willing to change their course, institution or type of study in order to improve their experience, all pointing to the high importance of social integration for many.