Following the refugee influx of 2015 and 2016, many German higher education organisations (HEOs) responded with support programmes for refugee students. In this context, refugees became formally and discursively differentiated from other international students. During later stages of the programmes, this differentiation became blurred, and discourse surrounding refugee students partly shifted back to framing them as international students, which is also represented in further support programme development. Based on a systems theoretical framework, this paper investigates the shifting organisational discourse on refugee students within the context of functional needs and structural changes at German HEOs. The analysis shows that structural development is strongly related to the way functional needs and ways to address them are constituted by discursive representations. It is based on 25 expert interviews with heads of international offices and first contacts for refugees at eight German HEOs.