Developing Academic Cultural Capital among First-Generation Chinese Undergraduates: A Qualitative Study at the University of Manchester

This project examined the experiences of first-generation Chinese undergraduate students at the University of Manchester. Getting into a UK university takes a lot of hard work, but doing well once students arrive often requires a different kind of knowledge. They need to understand how seminars work, what it means to write critically, how to read feedback, and what lecturers are looking for. Students whose parents have university experience may pick up some of this knowledge at home without realising it. For students whose parents never attended university, this kind of background knowledge is often less available before they arrive. Seven third-year students took part in interviews. They discussed the challenges they faced when they first started university, what helped them adjust, and how their confidence changed over time. The findings show that these students often felt underprepared for the unwritten rules of academic life, not because they were less able, but because they had less access to informal academic guidance before entering university. Over time, most of them found ways to build this knowledge through seminars, written feedback, peer relationships, and mentor support. By their third year, many felt more confident and settled academically, although feeling socially at home remained harder to achieve.

The most immediate practical implication of this study is for how UK universities design their transition and support provision for Chinese international students. At present, support tends to be offered to this group without much distinction between students from different educational backgrounds. This study suggests that first-generation students face a specific set of challenges related to unfamiliarity with academic conventions, and that these challenges are not well addressed by generic international student support. More targeted induction programmes and mentoring arrangements that explicitly help students navigate the hidden curriculum of UK higher education could make a meaningful difference for this group. This study also contributes to research on widening participation and internationalisation in UK higher education. One of its main arguments is that first- generation status needs to be understood in relation to the academic context students enter. In this study, participants’ families could support overseas study and valued education, but they could not offer much practical knowledge about how UK higher education works. This suggests that researchers and universities should look not only at parents’ education level, but also at what kinds of academic knowledge students can access before university. More broadly, the findings show the value of qualitative, within-group research, because it can capture differences among students that larger surveys may miss. The study may be useful to student support staff, international student advisers, and others who help students from less familiar educational backgrounds adjust to university.