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

At the heart of Yang’s book is a systematic comparison of how Chinese and Anglo-American societies conceive the public good of higher education. Using a method the review describes as trans-positional analysis, Yang moves between the two traditions across five key themes, refusing to treat either as a universal benchmark against which the other must be measured. In the Anglo-American tradition, the public good of universities has been framed largely through liberal individualism, market accountability and the state’s retreat from direct provision. In the Chinese tradition, by contrast, education has long been entwined with the moral cultivation of persons, the responsibilities of family and collectivity, and the state’s role as guarantor of social harmony and meritocratic mobility. Yang’s argument is that these are not merely different policy preferences but structurally different ways of generating public value.

The reviewers sharpen this point by distinguishing three levels at which the structural differences operate. At the normative level, the two traditions answer differently what a university is for: individual enrichment and economic productivity in the Anglo-American frame, versus self-perfection and collective flourishing in the Confucian frame. At the institutional level, they differ in how funding, governance and evaluation distribute responsibility between state, market and society, with Chinese higher education embedding the state more deeply in defining educational purpose, as seen in debates over the gaokao entrance examination and its double constraints. At the subjective level, students and academics internalise these divergent logics, shaping how individuals imagine their own agency, obligation and belonging within the university.

What makes the review—and the book it examines—technically significant for the field is the concept of epistemic justice, borrowed from Miranda Fricker’s 2007 work on power and the ethics of knowing. Applied to higher education research, epistemic injustice means that knowledge produced in non-Western traditions is systematically discounted, translated into Western categories or treated as exotic raw material rather than as theory in its own right. Tao and Li argue that Yang’s comparison directly challenges this Western-centrism. By drawing on Chinese philosophical resources with the same seriousness conventionally reserved for liberal political theory, the book performs what the reviewers call an advance in epistemic justice: it insists that the Chinese tradition can generate concepts, not merely case studies.

The most conceptually charged of these resources is tianxia, often translated as all-under-heaven, an classical Chinese vision of world order in which political and moral community extends across the entire known world rather than being bounded by nation-states. In recent years, philosopher Zhao Tingyang has revived tianxia as an ontological argument for a new world order, and Yang and her collaborators—including Simon Marginson and Xin Xu—have developed it as a heuristic for higher education, proposing a world-centred rather than nation-centred imaginary for global academia. Their 2024 article in Globalisation, Societies and Education, titled Thinking through the world, and their 2025 Higher Education paper on the global aspirations of Chinese universities both treat tianxia as a lens for imagining universities as contributors to a shared human world rather than competitors in a zero-sum rankings game.

Yet the review is refreshingly candid about the disputes this agenda has provoked, and it engages critics rather than dismissing them. Four risks receive sustained attention: reductionism, essentialism, re-orientalism and the co-optation of tianxia. Reductionism is the danger of flattening vast, internally diverse civilisations into single explanatory formulas. Essentialism treats Chinese and Western cultures as fixed, homogenous essences rather than dynamic, hybridising formations—a concern echoed by W.W. Lo and Rui Yang’s work on hybridisation and recombination in Chinese societies, and by Zhu, Shen and Yang’s 2025 Higher Education study showing how Chinese humanities and social science scholars actively transform traditions into academic resources rather than merely inheriting them.

Re-orientalism poses a subtler trap. Building on Edward Said’s 1977 critique of Orientalism and subsequent debates in Chinese scholarship by scholars such as Wang Ning and Zhou Ning, the reviewers note that even well-intentioned efforts to celebrate Chinese traditions can reproduce the same East-West binary that Orientalism created, positioning China as a mystical civilisational Other. Mulvey’s 2026 article in Comparative Education goes further, asking whether the essentialisation of China within so-called critical internationalisation studies constitutes a new Orientalism. The tianxia concept attracts the sharpest critique of all: Fei Yan’s 2026 article, The darker side of Tianxia, warns that the framework carries imperial histories and could be co-opted to serve state power, while Moreno García and Pines’s comparative historical work on Maat and Tianxia reminds readers that ancient world-order ideologies, Egyptian and Chinese alike, were instruments of rule as much as philosophies of harmony. Berlin debates between Zhao and Western philosophers, documented in World Philosophy, show that these objections are not merely external attacks but live controversies within the tianxia literature itself.

The reviewers’ response to these disputes is arguably the review’s most important analytical move. Rather than concluding that tradition-based research is too dangerous or too essentialist to pursue, they argue that the risks are internal to any serious cross-cultural scholarship and must be managed through methodological reflexivity, attention to hybridity and genuine two-way dialogue. They situate Yang’s book within a broader movement documented across the field: Xu’s work on epistemic diversity in comparative research and on a Chinese definition of internationalisation; Bamberger, Mulvey and Yan’s 2026 call for internationalisation scholarship beyond the Western horizon; Jackson and Kwak’s probing question of whether philosophy of education is Western at all; and parallel non-Western resources such as Dladla’s Ubuntu philosophy of liberation and Mun and Min’s account of the Korean public good as jeong. Seen together, these works suggest a discipline in the midst of an epistemic diversification whose trajectory Yang’s book may well consolidate.

The practical stakes extend well beyond theory. For policymakers, the three-level framework—normative, institutional, subjective—offers a diagnostic tool for understanding why policy transplants so often fail: a governance model detached from its civilisational soil produces different, and sometimes perverse, effects when grafted onto another tradition. For university leaders navigating international partnerships, the review implies that cooperation grounded in mutual conceptual translation will be more durable than arrangements that quietly assume Anglo-American categories are universal. For students, particularly the growing cohort of globally mobile learners whose identity negotiations are documented in Xiaoshi Li’s own research on Chinese master’s students in Hong Kong, the debate determines whether their educational traditions are treated as liabilities to be overcome or as resources to be drawn upon.

Tao and Li close with a forward-looking assessment: Yang’s book, they conclude, will prompt more equal and meaningful cross-cultural dialogues in the field, making it invaluable to researchers, policymakers, students and anyone interested in what they call civilisational dialogues. The phrase is telling. What began as a book review has become a statement about the future epistemology of higher education research itself—a field long dominated by centres in the United States, the United Kingdom and Western Europe, and increasingly challenged by scholarship from East Asia and the Global South. Whether tianxia, Confucian self-cultivation and kindred concepts can enrich a genuinely global conversation without hardening into new orthodoxies remains an open question. But the review makes clear that the question can no longer be avoided, and that the answer will shape how universities everywhere understand their public purpose.

Subject of Research: Traditions as civilisational resources for cross-cultural dialogues in global higher education research

Article Title: Traditions as civilisational resources for cross-cultural dialogues in global higher education research: disputes and prospects

Article References: Traditions as civilisational resources for cross-cultural dialogues in global higher education research: disputes and prospects. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01759-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01759-2

Keywords: higher education, public good, cross-cultural dialogue, tianxia, epistemic justice, comparative education, Chinese tradition, Anglo-American higher education, Western-centrism, civilisational dialogue, Lili Yang, internationalisation