Ethnic minority students—often descendants of earlier waves of immigrants from neighbouring South and Southeast Asian countries—have been under-represented in enrolment in higher education in Hong Kong. In addressing low university/college-enrolment, traditionally under-represented students’ family and community are considered deficit and under-resourced, and their inherent values and strengths remain unrecognised and less-explored. This study employed the community cultural wealth framework to highlight the various forms of capital existing within the families and communities of 15 South/Southeast Asian university students that had allowed them to navigate university predisposition, search and choice processes. The findings of this study unveil the diversity and richness of capital within non-dominant communities that have limited access to capital, normalised within hegemonic and oppressive educational institutions and call for researchers and educators to legitimise and utilise the community resources for widening university attendance. Copyright © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought various challenges to the education domain globally. This study examines how a group of non-local university students studying at EMI universities in Hong Kong adjusted to the dominant online mode of learning and communication based on their lived experiences in learning and intercultural social networking during the pandemic. Employing the theory of digital literacies and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and capital, we show how students expanded, redeveloped and transferred existing awareness, knowledge, competences and practices to engage in a range of digitally mediated academic and social activities in this condition. We conclude by discussing how the findings may inform refinement or readjustment of digitalized/zing international higher education. Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Drawing on in-depth interview data from 31 mainland Chinese (MLC) students in a Hong Kong university, this article conceptualises MLC and Hong Kong higher education as two dissonant but interrelated subfields of the Chinese higher education field. The article argues that these MLC students' habitus, one that possesses rich economic, social and cultural capital, prompts a strong sense of entitlement to anticipated privileges. However, this sense of entitlement is disrupted by the differential capital valuations across these fields. There is thus notable habitus-field disjuncture, which, exacerbated by the hysteresis effect, gives rise to a sense of disappointment and ambivalence. This article demonstrates how the Hong Kong education credential, which these students initially set out to pursue as a form of capital, can become a disadvantage at multiple levels; the article illustrates that capital valuation and conversion in a transborder context is not a straightforward, but rather a complicated and sometimes contradictory, process.
[© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group]