Mapping overseas education through local lens: valuation, merit, and hierarchy in Chinese students’ college applications

Abstract

This article examines the evaluation of overseas education in the context of local meritocratic beliefs. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at an educational consulting agency based in Beijing, it employs a sociology of valuation framework to analyze how institutional and embodied cultural capital are assessed in students’ applications to foreign universities. I show how agency workers, acting as cultural intermediaries, work with parents’ and students’ expectations to formulate evaluative claims about overseas institutions and about students’ own qualifications. While bringing together multiple, at times conflicting, meritocratic ideals, this evaluative process revolves around a one-dimensional meritocratic logic aligned with China’s state-defined educational hierarchy. I argue that the value of foreign degrees, far from fixed or innate, is socially constructed and contingent upon local systems of evaluation.