Student Agency, Not Just Job Stats, Shapes Success in Transnational Universities

Every year, hundreds of thousands of students across Asia enrol in transnational higher education, pursuing degrees from foreign universities delivered on home soil. Universities trumpet their graduate outcomes: employment rates, salary premiums, destinations at multinational firms. But a new study argues that these metrics hide the most important story of all, which is how students actually exercise their agency as they chase their aspirations through institutions that both enable and constrain them. The research, published in the journal Higher Education, followed 80 students at two transnational higher education institutions and found that what matters most is not a fixed trait carried into university, but a dynamic capacity that evolves over time, shaped by past beliefs, present deliberations, and imagined futures.

The study, conducted by Mei Lai of Soochow University and Jisun Jung of the University of Hong Kong, deliberately pivots away from conventional outcome measures. Instead of asking what graduates achieved, the researchers asked how students engaged intentionally with their circumstances, how they navigated structural constraints, and how their aspirations took shape through lived experience. This process-focused approach, the authors argue, excavates the individual engagements that metric-driven data renders invisible. It is a challenge to an entire industry of employability dashboards and outcome benchmarks that dominate how universities are judged and ranked.

At the theoretical heart of the paper lies a framework borrowed from sociologist Mustafa Emirbayer and professor Ann Mische, whose influential 1998 account of agency describes it as a chordal triad composed of three temporal dimensions. The iterational dimension draws on the past, on routines and habits formed through prior experience. The projective dimension looks forward, toward imagined possible futures. The practical-evaluative dimension operates in the present, as people deliberate and judge amid competing demands and possibilities. Lai and Jung used this temporal lens to trace how students at transnational institutions continually recombine these three elements as their circumstances shift, rather than possessing agency as a stable, once-and-for-all endowment.

The empirical grounding came from the lived experiences of 80 students at two transnational higher education institutions, examined through qualitative thematic analysis. The findings reveal a striking picture of agency in motion. Students’ agentic orientation, the authors report, is informed by past beliefs in meritocracy, by situated deliberations in the present, and by imagined cosmopolitan futures. Many students arrived carrying a deep conviction that hard work would be rewarded, a belief in meritocratic systems that framed their initial aspirations. Yet as they encountered the realities of their institutions and labour markets, this conviction was tested, renegotiated, and sometimes transformed. Agency, in other words, is not a fixed attribute but a trajectory.

Crucially, the study distinguishes between enabled and constrained agency, and this distinction is where the institutional analysis becomes sharp. The dynamic interplay between individual agency and institutional structure shapes students’ capacity to aspire and their strategies of action across time. Some university practices opened possibilities, giving students the resources, networks, and confidence to formulate and pursue ambitious plans. Others closed them down, leaving students to improvise alone against structural headwinds. The researchers interrogate what they call the deterministic role of economic rationalism, the assumption that students are simply rational economic actors who will convert inputs like international curricula and career services into labour market success. The evidence suggests something far more contingent.

That contingency, the authors argue, hinges on three synergistic elements of university practice: ideological, regulative, and socio-emotional. Ideological elements concern the values and narratives an institution transmits about what success looks like and who can achieve it. Regulative elements encompass the formal structures, rules, and provisions that channel student action. Socio-emotional elements involve trust, care, and relational support, the human texture of institutional life. The study’s central argument is that these three elements work together, synergically, to influence how well students prepare for post-graduation life. An institution that supplies resources without cultivating trust, or that preaches cosmopolitan futures without regulative support to pursue them, produces gaps between what students are promised and what they can actually enact.

One of the most consequential findings concerns the internationalisation of higher education itself. The researchers observe that internationalisation is often accompanied by a resource-centric approach, an emphasis on importing curricula, credentials, facilities, and partnerships, while neglecting stakeholders’ internal uptake and conversion process. In the language of the sociological literature the study engages, it is not enough to distribute capital; institutions must attend to how individuals convert that capital into meaningful action. A student surrounded by international resources may still lack the confidence, guidance, or institutional trust needed to translate them into aspiration. This insight echoes a broader critique in the scholarship, including arguments that challenge what some researchers have called the skills fetish, the assumption that packaging skills guarantees employability.

The concept of the capacity to aspire, drawn originally from anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, gives the study its normative ambition. Aspiration, in this view, is not simply an individual daydream but a culturally situated capacity that can be nurtured or starved. For students in transnational institutions, often navigating expectations of global mobility alongside local realities and family obligations, the capacity to aspire becomes a delicate achievement. The study shows how students construct strategies of action across time, adjusting their plans as beliefs in meritocracy collide with structural constraints, and as imagined cosmopolitan futures are weighed against present deliberations. Some students find pathways through; others experience their agency narrowing as graduation approaches.

The implications for universities are direct. The study concludes by urging higher education institutions to create supportive and trust-based environments that cultivate student agency, recognising it as essential for individuals’ long-term development and resilience. This reframing matters for how universities understand their mission. If agency is cultivated rather than merely possessed, then institutional design becomes an exercise in fostering temporal capacities: helping students draw productively on their pasts, deliberate effectively in the present, and project credible futures. It also matters for policy, since systems that evaluate transnational institutions purely on graduate outcomes may reward resource accumulation while ignoring whether students are actually developing the agentic capacities those resources are meant to serve.

The study arrives at a moment when transnational higher education continues its rapid expansion, particularly across China and wider Asia, with branch campuses and Sino-foreign cooperative universities enrolling ever larger cohorts. As the sector matures, questions about quality have shifted from inputs to experiences, and this research pushes that shift further, from experiences to the temporal dynamics of agency that underlie them. Its methodological lesson is equally pointed: graduate outcome data, however sophisticated, cannot capture the intentional engagements that determine whether students flourish. By listening to 80 students describe how their aspirations evolved, Lai and Jung offer a corrective to measurement culture, one that recentres the student as a temporal, deliberating, aspiring person rather than a data point on a destination chart. Whether institutions heed that corrective may shape the next generation of transnational education.

Subject of Research: Student agency and the capacity to aspire in transnational higher education

Article Title: Beyond graduate outcomes: a temporal-agential perspective on students’ capacity to aspire in transnational higher education

Article References: Lai, M., & Jung, J. (2026). Beyond graduate outcomes: a temporal-agential perspective on students’ capacity to aspire in transnational higher education. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01768-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01768-1

Keywords: transnational higher education, student agency, capacity to aspire, graduate outcomes, Emirbayer and Mische, temporal-agential perspective, internationalisation, employability, institutional structure, meritocracy, cosmopolitan futures, Higher Education journal