How would the Academic Aspiration and Interests among Humanities Students evolve? Evidence from Humanities Honors Program in Peking University

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Higher education SIG roundtable 3

Proposal

Sufficient supplies of future scholars are extraordinarily pivotal for educational sustainability and societal advancements yet we know little about their evolvement processes of academic aspirations and interests, which virtually constitute a stepping stone to be academics. In response to the continuous queries of why Chinese universities fail to cultivate outstanding academics, this study has followed up a group of elite bachelor students graduated in year 2017 from an honors program in classical language and literature initiated by Peking University in China to identify the fundamental mechanisms and antecedents of their formations of academic aspirations and interests. Ranked as one of the top universities, Peking University has officially opened this honors program to foster future scholars in the Division of Humanities since 2010, whom are supervised by pooled resources simultaneously from three Humanities majors including Chinese Literature, History, and Philosophy. Under this circumstance, this research should supplement the omitted examinations over students in humanities majors other than science, replenish comprehensive influencers of the formations of academic aspirations and interests via an inductive method, and provide salient practical implications for other universities in emerging economies.
Based on stratified sampling method, we’ve randomly selected 7 students out of 15, who graduated from this honors program in 2017, coming from three different majors, Chinese Literature, History, and Philosophy, to conduct thorough interviews. Ingeniously controlled the interviewing environments and minimized the priming effects, each interviewee was asked to recall his/her progresses in forming their academic aspirations and interests. Notes were taken during the one-hour primary interviews and supplementary follow-ups. Eventually, we’ve adopted the three-level coding method to identity the factors and causal mechanisms thus develop our proposed theoretical model.
The research has unambiguously identified cultural capital, significant others, and immanent talent are the three crucial factors constituting a dynamic model capturing the formation of academic aspirations and interests. The newly developed model has confirmed that Bourdieu’s culture capital theory and Mills’ significant others are indeed macro determinants that boost the formation yet each individually can’t portray the full canvas. Furthermore, talent is a third decisive factor as emerged from the data analysis. Precisely speaking, endowments of cultural capital determine academic interests with a diminishing trajectory whereas significant others (e.g. teachers, classmates, friends, and etc.) in tandem with talent facilitate academic aspirations and interests with an uprising trajectory. On the other hand, however, talent is a persistent subjective criterion whatever academic decisions need to be made whilst significant others play a decisive role specifically in determining the interest of the majoring subject and its continuation.
There are three major contributions. Firstly, we’ve proved that cultural capital is not that important in determining the academia in emerging economies like China as compared to Western societies with a peculiar sample collected from one of the top universities in China. However, richer cultural capital can help the students to establish their academic aspirations and interests earlier. During this course, Chinese grandparents usually render much support to their grandchildren’s early academic preparations. Furthermore, neither Bourdieu nor Mills has provided an adequate theoretical toolkit to investigate the formation of academic aspiration and interests yet the results from our qualitative study in turn provide a preliminary framework to comprehensively examine such educational issues. Last but not the least, as suggested by the proposed dynamic model, the study reminds practical implications that educators should recognize the crucial role of significant others and talent endowments to better select and train Humanities students at different stages, which is conspicuously conducive to faster their progressing.

Author

• Yuting Shen, Graduate School of Education,Peking University