Grade as a student’s lifeblood? Exploring Chinese rural students’ evolving constructions of the ‘ideal student’ through higher education

ABSTRACT Since the expansion of higher education, many rural students in China managed to enter urban universities. However, migrating across layers of structural constraints, those rural students faced dramatic transitions and challenges in the urban university. Drawing upon 50 rural students’ narratives about their educational trajectories, I find that participants in this research moved from the rural context, which almost exclusively emphasized academic performance, to a versatile and complex university culture, featuring implicit and ambiguous expectations of students. The rural students’ perceived desirable traits, together with the suzhi discourse, reinforced the existing symbolic inequality of the social structure and justified the legitimacy of the dominant group’s culture. Moreover, participants generally lacked an accurate grasp of the expectations of students in university, which resulted in a lasting sense of ambivalence and uneasiness. Therefore, exploring the connotation of ideal student is a crucial approach to enable the disadvantaged group to better grasp the hidden mechanisms of urban universities.