Taken-for-Granted Understandings in Access to International Higher Education: A Study of Chinese Agent-User Students’ Overseas University Application Experiences

• In Event: Challenges in Higher Education and Internationalization

Abstract

Education agents appear to play a greater role in the fierce international student recruitment campaign. However, little has been known about the effect of the widespread use of education agents on (in)equalities in access to international higher education. This paper investigates Chinese agent-user students’ university application experiences. It draws on longitudinal semi-structured interviews with 10 Chinese agent-user students from November 2020 to July 2022 and uses Bourdieu’s concept of doxa for data analysis. This paper implies that education agents play a symbolic dominance in overseas university application competitions, who ostensibly work for Chinese agent-user students to facilitate their applications and advance their position in the competition, but fundamentally serve to consolidate the hierarchies of UK universities by stimulating application numbers.

Author

• Ying Yang, The Education University of Hong Kong