For students who relocate across cities, entering university involves not only a transition into higher education but also movement into a new city opportunity structure. This study examines whether origin–destination differences in city opportunity structures shape first-year adaptation difficulty, and whether these relationships vary by university context. Student survey data from 6,787 first-year students in China are linked to city-level indicators covering 34 provincial-level units and 320 prefecture-level cities. The results show that the development opportunity differential is the most consistent correlate of adaptation difficulty, whereas city support and living-environment differentials are weaker and less stable. Moving into a more developmentally advantaged city does not make the first year easier. Instead, it is associated with greater academic adaptation difficulty, suggesting that developmental mobility may generate pressure before it yields advantage. University-type heterogeneity is more evident for social and overall adaptation difficulty. Taken together, the findings show that first-year adaptation is shaped not only by post-entry adjustment within institutions but also by unequal city contexts at entry, thereby extending frameworks of student adaptation and development beyond the institution and bringing the spatial unevenness of higher education into the analysis of transition.
Quantitative evaluation increasingly shapes doctoral training and competition for faculty positions, yet how visible performance and other doctoral training experiences relate to subsequent career development remains insufficiently understood. Drawing on survey data from 2,148 faculty members with doctoral degrees in the mainland China sample of the Academic Profession in the Knowledge-Based Society (APIKS) project, this study distinguishes explicit and implicit doctoral capital on the basis of institutional visibility. Scholarship acquisition represents the former, while autonomous topic choice and attentive supervisory guidance indirectly represent the latter. The study examines their associations with publication productivity and leadership positions within academic communities. Scholarship acquisition is significantly and positively associated with subsequent publication productivity, but not with community leadership positions. Autonomous topic choice and supervisory guidance are significantly and positively associated with community leadership positions, but not with publication productivity. Subgroup analyses by career-accumulation period and discipline reveal exploratory patterns, but interaction tests provide no stable evidence of differences. The study extends discussions of the career returns to doctoral education to two dimensions: organizational performance evaluation and recognition within professional communities. It also proposes a recursive risk that remains to be tested: by reshaping training and selection, the upstream extension of quantitative evaluation may affect the foundations on which future professional judgment is formed.
Gen Z students in Indian STEM institutions increasingly reject narrow, placement-centric student success models based on the scarcity mindset. Instead, they seek autonomy, meaning, satisfaction, and holistic well-being over transactional career outcomes defined for them. The Holistic Success Architecture (HSA) established that Perceived Holistic Success (PHS) is fully mediated by Psychological Capital (PsyCap) and Career and Life Preparedness (CLP), specifying what must be developed with active and personalised institutional support. The practitioner question left unanswered is how? This paper introduces the Shared Student Success Model (SSSM), a five-dimension, six-level staged institutional maturity framework that operationalises the HSA as a deployable model for HEIs. Its defining architecture mandates that all five dimensions; Student, Faculty and Staff Capacity, Technology and Data, Institutional Climate and Governance, and Infrastructure and Support Services advance together through each maturity level. Using Design-Based Research, the SSSM was developed and validated across two implementation cycles at a higher education institution in India against a pre-SSSM baseline cohort. Results demonstrate significant improvements in PsyCap, CLP, and PHS across both cycles, with Cycle 2 producing larger effect sizes consistent with the co-advancement hypothesis and institutional progression on maturity levels. A novel Co-Creation Quality Index (CQI) confirms that co-creation was experienced by students as genuinely meaningful. Implications for institutional practice, student engagement and higher education policy are discussed.
Research on academic mobility generally finds “mover’s advantage” on scholarly performance, with mobile academics demonstrating higher productivity and citation impact than their stationary peers. However, existing studies largely treat mobile scholars as homogeneous populations and focus on mean comparisons, potentially obscuring distributional heterogeneity across performance levels and mobility directions. Recognizing that institutional context fundamentally shapes mobility outcomes, we examine how different mobility directions (upward, lateral, and downward in institutional prestige) affect research performance. We analyze 11-year event-time bibliometric data for 658 mobile academics from China’s “Double First-Class” universities, measuring publication output, citation impact, and collaboration scope from five years before to five years after each mobility event. Using inverse probability weighting based on research motivation and a broad set of individual, organizational, and regional covariates to address selection bias, combined with distributional analysis through Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, we find substantial heterogeneity in post-mobility outcomes. Upward mobility is associated with more favorable outcomes across most performance dimensions—most clearly citation impact and collaboration scope—while downward mobility is followed by an immediate “citation cliff effect”. Rather than a monotone prestige gradient, we find a threshold effect: lateral and downward movers show no statistically detectable distributional difference, while only upward moves are associated with an advantage. Our results reveal systematic differences in mobility effects across different mobility direction groups, challenging assumptions about uniform mobility benefits. The findings suggest that institutional prestige shapes research visibility through closely intertwined reputational and resource channels, highlighting the importance of considering both research motivation and distributional effects in understanding academic career trajectories.
Scholarly interest in the return migration of internationally trained academics has grown considerably, particularly in countries such as China that actively recruit overseas talent. Existing studies have largely focused on returnees who secure faculty positions, leaving limited understanding of how overseas-trained PhDs re-enter academia through postdoctoral appointments and how such positions are lived after return. Drawing on a new materialist assemblage perspective, this duo-ethnographic study examines the postdoctoral becoming of two Chinese PhD returnees working in elite universities in China. The findings are that postdoctoral becoming is assembled through three interrelated processes. First, the postdoctoral appointment operates as an aspirational yet precarious re-entry device, carrying returnees’ hopes of becoming recognised scholars and fears that such recognition may not arrive in time. Second, postdoctoral becoming unfolds through infrastructures of partial legibility and uneven recognition, through which returnees’ academic presence becomes visible only in fragments and their transnational academic capital remains subject to domestic re-certification. Third, mundane objects and everyday routines operate as affective-material supports through which postdocs sustain academic work amid ongoing precarity. The study contributes to higher education research by showing that overseas-trained PhDs’ re-entry into Chinese academia through postdoctoral appointments is not a linear process of reintegration or a straightforward conversion of overseas credentials into domestic advantage. Instead, their postdoctoral trajectories are materially and affectively assembled in ways that make academic futures possible, deferred and unevenly sustained.
