Stories to Live by: Narrative Understandings of the Self-Concept of Students at Self-Financing Higher Education Institutions in Hong Kong

Abstract

Self-financing higher education institutions (SfHEIs) in Hong Kong help boost the local higher education participation rate, but they are labeled as second-tier opportunities for those with academic weaknesses. Students at SfHEIs may develop a negative self-concept that deteriorates their academic performance and psychological wellness. Therefore, it is critical to understand their self-concept and how it is built. From the narrative perspective, a self-concept is the storied experiences or stories that are lived; therefore, this study employs narrative inquiry using 15 SfHEI students to represent the general pattern of the participants’ experiences. This study proves that students at SfHEIs tend to view themselves as losers or inferiors based on their low self-evaluations of their Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE) results, SfHEIs, and career futures. Additionally, this study sheds new light that the loser identity is historically developed from childhood during interactions with parents and teachers, as parents and teachers continuously reinforce the message that enrollment at a publicly funded university is the only way to achieve success in life.

1. Introduction

In many Asian societies, such as Japan and Korea, students are implored to study hard and prepare well for examinations in order to compete for university admission, which is the shared aspiration of the students [1,2]. Hong Kong is not an exception. In order to alleviate students’ academic stress, the Hong Kong government has reformed the education system since 2000 [3]. One strategy the government applies is the expansion of higher education through privatization, namely, by developing self-financing higher education institutions (SfHEIs) to offer self-financing postsecondary degree programs [4,5]. Although the higher education participation rate for the 17–20 age cohort has reached 60% since the privatization of higher education, the higher education system of Hong Kong is still an elite system; less than 20% of age-appropriate students can enroll at publicly funded universities [6,7]. Since this 20% of students comprises those who achieve outstanding results on a competitive and high-stakes examination called the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE), they are perceived as more talented and competent than others [8]. Therefore, as Wong and Tse [9] observe, students who enroll in publicly funded universities have higher self-esteem and self-evaluation than students who enroll in SfHEIs. Moreover, compared with SfHEIs, publicly funded universities can equip students with richer social and cultural capital due to better quality teaching and learning environments, leading to better career prospects [10,11,12]. This implies that getting into publicly funded universities may enhance the life chances and social mobility of students [13]. All of these situations legitimatize the prestigious status of publicly funded universities and produce a social image of SfHEIs as second-tier opportunities for academically weak students [12,14]. Consequently, if students fail to get into publicly funded universities and need to study at the SfHEIs, they may perceive themselves negatively [8]. This negative self-perception may cause students to construct self-concepts of being ‘losers’ [9,15,16]. As self-concept may affect a youth’s academic performance and psychological wellness [17,18,19], it is important to investigate how students at SfHEIs perceive themselves and how their self-concepts are developed in order to provide recommendations to enhance and sustain positive self-concepts. Nevertheless, as Wong, Mak, Ng and Zhao [8] note, researchers have paid little attention to this issue; therefore, there is not much knowledge about it. To fill this research gap, this study explores how students at SfHEIs perceive themselves and how their self-concept is developed. Unlike conventional studies that view students’ self-concept as a static notion comprising different attributes, e.g., [20,21], this study suggests, from a narrative perspective, that a student’s self-concept is an evolving self-knowledge that dynamically develops based on that student’s ‘storied’ past and present experiences and anticipated future. Thus, this study advances our knowledge for the sustainable development of the self-concepts of students at SfHEIs.

2. Context of Hong Kong Education System

As a Chinese society, the Hong Kong education system has been influenced by Confucian heritage. According to Confucianism, education is a means to develop people to become junzi (men of virtue) who reach the highest standard of benevolence, justice, politeness, wisdom, fidelity, integrity, and filial piety [22]. Due to their virtue, junzi have been described as the most suitable persons to take leadership roles in traditional Chinese society. In order to select this type of person to be an official to assist social governance, imperial China established a pyramid examination system, called keju, to scan elites who were familiar with Confucianism from the Western Zhou Dynasty (1027–771 BC). Therefore, from this cultural point of view, education, especially in the form of high-stakes examinations, has been regarded as a gateway to upward mobility in Chinese societies and has become a granted narrative in contemporary Chinese societies, including Hong Kong.

As influenced by its cultural heritage, Hong Kong has developed an elite, meritocratic, and pyramidal education system that values examinations as the most valid method for assessing people’s attainment and merits for social selection [23]. Based on examination results, the education system stratifies students within and between schools from primary to higher education [24,25,26]. This means students with good academic performance will be tracked to good classes and schools, while students with poor academic performance will be tracked to poor classes and schools. Since the educational stratification significantly shapes the life chances of Hong Kong students [23], compared with school tests and examinations, Hong Kong students are pressured to study hard and prepare well for HKDSE, the high-stakes public examination for university entrance in Hong Kong, because it determines whether they can enroll in publicly funded universities [3]. Thus, those areas of unexamined knowledge, such as sports, are less important subjects in Hong Kong [3].

Since only around 20% of students can enroll in publicly funded universities, not all students whose HKDSE results reach the minimum requirements for university admission can get into the universities. For those who fail to receive offers from any publicly funded universities, they need to choose one of the 11 degree-awarding SfHEIs if they want to pursue a local bachelor’s degree. Nevertheless, most of the SfHEIs are newly established, so their reputations are lower than those of publicly funded universities. Moreover, their status as self-financing institutions allows the SfHEIs to be less selective in choosing students. Thus, once a student meets the minimum requirements, an SfHEI generally gives them an offer. As a result, the SfHEIs are socially regarded as second-tier higher education institutions in Hong Kong. This second-tier image affects the employability of the SfHEIs’ graduates [11]. Therefore, many students do not want to study at the SfHEIs if they have other choices [12].

3. Narratives and Self-Concept

Conventionally, self-concept is conceptualized as an organized structure of self-knowledge or self-understanding based on attributes [27]. For example, Stake [20] suggests that one’s self-concept consists of the following attributes: likeability, morality, task accomplishment, giftedness, power, and vulnerability. In her research on undergraduate students’ academic self-concept, Isiksal [28] identifies that the academic self-concept is composed of learning effort, study habits, peer evaluation of academic ability, self-confidence, satisfaction with school, and self-doubt. Similarly, Wang, et al. [29] show that nursing students’ self-concept may comprise four dimensions: care, knowledge, social relations, and leadership. Based on these attributes, the overall self-evaluation contributes to a self-scheme by which people make sense of themselves and direct their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in social situations [30]. Accordingly, students at SfHEIs may perceive themselves based on a self-evaluation of their academic abilities and the reputation of the SfHEIs at which they study. For instance, due to their undesirable HKDSE results which led SfHEIs to be their only choice for pursuing a bachelor’s degree, the students at the SfHEIs tend to perceive themselves as academically weak, low achievers, and even losers in Hong Kong [8]. Although this perspective contributes to understanding one’s self-concept, it tends to ignore the processual nature of self-concept that is ongoing, unfinished, and continuously configured and reconfigured. As Ezzy [31] notes, self-concept is “coherent but fluid and changeable, historically grounded but ‘fictively’ reinterpreted, constructed by an individual but constructed in interaction and dialogue with other people”. Therefore, the conventional perspective may not comprehensively explain how one’s self-concept is developed, evolved, and sustained. To overcome this limitation, social psychologists propose a narrative perspective of self-concept, e.g., [31,32].

According to the narrative perspective, self-concept is understood as ‘storied’ experiences or stories to live by, i.e., the nexus of narratively constructed past and present experiences that shape the ways people live, who they are, and who they are becoming [33]. As life continues, the stories to live by are reconfigured by way of ongoing interactions with others in different social situations, thereby shaping people’s experiences. Although the stories are reconfigured and the updated versions may sometimes be disconnected or inconsistent with the previous versions, this does not affect the coherence of one’s self-concept. This is because people reflexively reconstruct and integrate the past and present with the anticipated future into a narrative whole while they ‘storytell’ about themselves intrapersonally or interpersonally [34]. This implies that self-concept is an evolving and integrative story by which people live [35].

As storied experiences, the self-concept basically involves narratives about a structuring of temporal events beginning with a setting in which narrators introduce the characters, the location, and the times when the stories occur, and are followed by episodes that illustrate the process of events [36]. In this sense, the narratives provide a landscape, which comprises sociality (people), temporality (time), and locality (places), for people to make sense of themselves and direct their actions toward the future [33]. Therefore, the narrative perspective calls researchers to pay attention to how the relationships between sociality, temporality, and locality are narratively arranged in the investigation of self-concept development. According to the narrative perspective, the self-concept of SfHEI students should be narratively developed based on past, present, and anticipated future experiences of social interactions.

4. Materials and Methods

This study employed the narrative inquiry method. Narrative inquiry is the study of experiences as stories that people tell over time and in different situations [36]. It allows researchers to gain access to an enriched understanding of the lives of people navigating their self-knowledge. Moreover, stories are, to some extent, socially constructed, since the stories people live by and tell are grounded in given sociocultural contexts [34]. Thus, narrative inquiry enables researchers to explore the social dimensions of one’s life story—“reflections of important social realities but not realities themselves” [37]. Therefore, narrative inquiry is an appropriate method for the present study that investigates how the self-concept of students at SfHEIs is developed from their stored experiences.

The research site was the Hong Kong Institute of Higher Education (pseudonym), an SfHEI established in 1985 and granted degree-conferring status in 2011. It is not an institution with university status. The data collection was conducted between 1 December 2017 and 23 February 2018. During the period, we sent invitations for research participation via email to all students at the Institute. Fifteen undergraduate students aged 17 to 21 expressed interest in participating in the project. Five of them majored in community studies, and ten majored in social work. There were nine second-year students, five third-year students, and one final-year student. Seven students were females and eight were males.

The first author met with the fifteen participants on 19 January 2018. According to Wang [38] and Plunkett, et al. [39], asking participants to take and discuss photographs regarding their lives facilitates reflection on their lives, and thus, helps elicit rich information on lived experiences. Therefore, the first author invited the participants to take at least 4 photographs within 4 weeks based on one or more of the following themes: (1) What was his or her school life like in the past? (2) What did he or she like the most about the education system in Hong Kong? (3) What did he or she dislike the most about the education system in Hong Kong? (4) What most represented the education system in Hong Kong to him or her? Four weeks later, on 23 February 2018, the first author invited them to join a group discussion session. In the discussion session, everyone was asked to share at least one of his or her photographs that was the most significant to him or her based on the following guiding questions: (1) Why would you like to share this photograph? (2) What did you see here? (3) What story does the photograph tell? (4) How does this relate to your life? Each sharing was approximately 15–20 min. After everyone finished sharing, in an attempt to elicit rich stories, the first author encouraged the participants to select those shared photographs that they wanted to discuss further as a group using the following questions: (1) Why did they choose these photographs for discussion? (2) What did the photographs mean to them? (3) How did the photographs relate to their lives?

After data collection, the sharing and discussion were transcribed. Then, the texts were analyzed using the holistic content reading approach, which “uses the complete life story of an individual and focuses on the content presented by it” in order to “analyze the meaning of the part in light of content that emerges from the rest of the narrative or in the context of the story in its entirety” [40]. Throughout the process, as recommended by Clandinin [36], we paid attention to the temporality, sociality, and locality of the narratives. We drafted a narrative account, which is the interpretive construction of an individual’s experiences according to temporality, sociality, and locality [36], for each participant. We shared and discussed the drafts with the participants in order to deepen our understanding of their experiences and, in turn, recompose the narrative accounts. Finally, we compared these narrative accounts in order to identify a narrative thread across all participants’ lives and then composed an integrated narrative to represent the general pattern of the participants’ experiences.

5. Results

5.1. Childhood Experience

The stories that all participants told were ‘loser’ stories. The stories began with their childhoods. The findings reveal a general phenomenon that the parents of the participants had been concerned about their educational attainment since they were in primary school. The parents closely monitored them, requiring them to study at home every day, and scrutinized their learning progress, even though some of the parents had to work during the daytime. If the participants did not do homework and adequately revise it, their parents would scold them and force them to complete the study work before they could rest. When school examinations came, the working parents might apply for annual leave and stay at home to monitor the participants to study for examinations.

The participants said their parents always told them “no education, no life” (Participant H), “you need to work hard now if you don’t want to lose in future competitions” (Participant B), and “you are going to a good university, then getting a good job and a brilliant life” (Participant C). Our findings show that the participants had been told, and consequently, had learned that enrolling at public universities was the way to success.

5.2. School Experience

The idea that enrolling at publicly funded universities was the prerequisite for success was reinforced when they went to senior secondary schools (Grades 10–12). Most participants were pressured by teachers to study hard for the HKDSE, leading to a situation that Participant D commented allowed for “no entertainment and leisure, just lessons, exercises, and assignments”. Their teachers kept reminding them that they had to work hard to prepare for the HKDSE because the examination results would largely determine their futures. Participant E said that his secondary school teachers warned him more than once in this way: “if you are not absorbed in learning, you’d better to quit early because you will still end up going back to the countryside to pick cow-dung”. To ensure that the participants concentrated on their studies, teachers encouraged them to quit extracurricular activities in order to have more time for studying. For instance, Participant G shared the following experience.

I can still remember one day in Grade 11. Instead of reviewing lessons for the entire day like most of my classmates did, I went out for a football training session. Unfortunately, I hurt my face, and a scar was left. What surprised me was that the next day my teacher did not really care about my wound but blamed me: “If you would have studied in library like everyone else did, you would not be injured at all.” She was actually indicating between the lines that playing football could not help me to get good job in the future; only good scores and a good university would. In addition, without a decent job, one is not valuable at all.

(Participant G)

Participant J had similar experiences. She said she had been on the school volleyball team since Grade 7. Nevertheless, her teachers thought that playing volleyball would distract her from concentrating on studying, and thus, kept advising her to quit the school team when she was in Grade 10. However, she did not take the teachers’ advice; hence, the teachers convinced her mother to force her to quit volleyball. Likewise, some other participants expressed that they were prevented from joining any extracurricular activities in secondary schools because their academic performance was less than satisfactory. For example, Participant M said her secondary school offered many extracurricular activities, but the opportunities to join were unequal for all students. Students who were academically weaker had to take supplementary classes while their peers participated in extracurricular activities. Participant M shared the following:

Teachers have the power to decide who can attend extracurricular activities. However, regardless of much potential and interest a student has, he or she is unlikely to be selected for an activity [compared to] students with good academic results. It is compulsory to attend supplementary classes if your academic performance is below average. Priority is given to supplementary classes even if you have other activities in the same timeslot. In other words, if your academic results are below average, your right to attend activities is constrained.

(Participant M)

In addition to schools and teachers, their parents also did not support them in spending time on extracurricular activities. Their parents thought that participating in extracurricular activities would not help the participants get into universities or bring them good career futures. Participant E’s story was an example. He loved playing tuba, and therefore, joined the school marching band from Grade 8 to Grade 10. He played tuba very well, so he often represented his school and performed tuba in different music festivals. At that time, he aspired to be a musician. Nevertheless, his parents disagreed with his dream about music by revealing that “they always said that there was no way out in music; you simply could not earn money by it.” Nevertheless, he questioned why music could not make money because his father bought two flats in Hong Kong by teaching erhu. However, he finally stopped playing tuba due to the pressure from his parents.

After quitting extracurricular activities, the participants basically spent all of their time studying and preparing for the HKDSE. To illustrate their lives at that time, some of the participants shared photos that showed private tutorial centers, advertisements for private tutoring, and a batch of learning materials provided by private tutors. The participants said the photos illustrated that their lives at that time were fully occupied by schools and tutorial classes after school. As Participant A suggested, “going to school and going to tutorial classes after school were all part of my daily life”. In addition, they had worked hard to prepare for the HKDSE by “practicing past tests and questions over and over again to not make any mistakes on a real test and get a good score” (Participant J). Participant H elaborated this point, as follows:

We kept reviewing past papers, going to tutorial classes, reciting books, and attending mock exams. For example, we kept reviewing past mathematics papers to review the long formula that we will not use again and kept reviewing past Chinese papers to understand the questions that the author did not think about. We spend much time and energy trying to obtain higher marks [on the HKDSE].

(Participant H)

5.3. Experience of Academic Failure

The participants studied hard, but their academic performance was less than satisfactory. Since their academic performance was not good, they eventually found that their teachers became less enthusiastic and committed to them, and more committed to those who performed well, academically. Participant E described that he was like a “hollow man” at that time.

Well-performing students caught most of the teachers’ attention. What about those who did not do well on the tests? Nobody cares. They were invisible in teachers’ eyes even though they were in the same classroom or had education that shadowed those who performed well. Take me as an example. Not a single teacher cared or reminded me when I slept in class during my Grades 10 and 11.

(Participant E)

Although they had strived for desirable HKDSE results in order to enroll at publicly funded universities, things did not happen as they wished. Their HKDSE results did not support their getting into a university in Hong Kong. Four participants shared photos showing their HKDSE certificates, because to them, the certificates were “loser certificates” (Participant E). Since they had no chance to enter publicly funded universities, they could only choose SfHEIs. However, they internalized the idea that “the public universities are the only road to success” (Participant L). Thus, to them, “studying those self-financing programs at SfHEIs implies you lose” (Participant M).

When I got a low score on the DSE, compared to those who got higher score, I felt like I was a loser, a loser not recognized or accepted by people close to me and by society. The education system massively produced losers because poorly performing test takers were self-stigmatized.

(Participant B)

5.4. Anticipated Future

Moreover, they found that what they had learned was meaningless to their lives and was only meaningful for examinations. Thus, some of them perceived “education as a waste of their time”.

Having reflected on my learning experience of more than 20 years, I asked myself a question: what did I learn? I felt as if my school life was just made for exams. In addition, by passing those exams, I could ultimately get into a good university. However, I couldn’t help but ask myself, what I have learned? The practical utility of my learning was so low that I could seldom apply that knowledge, e.g., the Pythagorean theorem, classical Chinese, etc., to my daily life.

(Student K)

The perception of wasted time also came from the low return on the investment in SfHEIs. Examining previous graduates, they noted that employees would look down on the educational credentials they would receive. Therefore, even though they could find a job, they believed that their salary might be lower than those of the graduates of publicly funded universities for the same position. Since the academic qualifications provided by SfHEIs were less valuable in the labor market, some of the participants planned to continue their education at publicly funded universities in order to upgrade their market value. However, they discovered that universities might also disvalue the educational credentials offered by SfHEIs, so that they might only continue their education via the self-financing track. Participant K expressed the following:

I failed the HKDSE, so I had no chance to get into a publicly funded university. Therefore, I took a diploma and progressed toward a higher diploma at a SfHEI. Indeed, this process is similar to playing a mobile game. In a mobile game, I can buy heroes to strengthen my competencies. In the same way, I can buy a certificate or diploma to increase my competencies. When you cannot get into university, you just pay for a self-financed degree course. If all goes well, one day you may be comparable with university students. However, you may also realize that the heroes you bought aren’t strong enough to help you compete with university students. You can only pay again and again to stay on the self-financing track. Yes, that’s the reality of losers.

(Student K)

6. Discussion

Echoing the observations from previous studies [8,9], this study shows that the students at SfHEIs tend to view themselves as losers or inferiors. To some extent, as expected by the conventional perspective, the negative self-concept is related to the students’ evaluation of their HKDSE results, the reputation of SfHEIs, and their career futures. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that their self-concept is not just a result of the evaluation, but also of their past, present, and anticipated future experiences. From their narratives, it is noted that the loser identity is historically developed from their childhoods during interactions with parents and teachers at home and schools. When they were young, the participants were told by the adults that enrolling at publicly funded universities was the only way to succeed in life. These participants internalized this thought. Thus, defining the road to success as studying hard for the HKDSE to enroll in publicly funded universities may have become the story they lived by. Therefore, when they failed to achieve the desirable ending of that story, they may deny that the efforts they had put into learning throughout their school years was worthwhile, and perceive their sacrifice for studying as meaningless. Based on the stories to live by, the participants may also anticipate that their career futures would be dim. In turn, all these interpretations may lead to self-doubt and make these participants perceive themselves as losers.

As Clandinin and Rosiek [37] and McLean [34] suggest, stories can be socially constructed narratives. The present study supports this argument. The findings imply that there is a sociocultural force that imposes the stories to live by upon the participants via significant others, such as parents and teachers. The sociocultural force, to some extent, is rooted in traditional Chinese culture and the contemporary economic structure of Hong Kong. Culturally, as a Chinese society, Hong Kong society has viewed examination-oriented education as a gateway to upward mobility. This view becomes a granted narrative in contemporary Hong Kong. This granted narrative, to some extent, is reinforced by the economic restructuring of Hong Kong that began in the 2000s. As affected by the financial crisis and economic depression in the 2000s, opportunities for upward mobility in Hong Kong have decreased and even disappeared [41]. As a result, families and schools have become more anxious about children’s future and have high expectations for them to study hard for a better future career [42]. Consequently, studying to enroll at publicly funded universities as the supreme educational opportunities and as the road to success becomes a legitimized granted narrative, shaping students’ experiences in Hong Kong.

Accordingly, the students at SfHEIs are inclined to have a negative self-concept–they perceive themselves as losers. This self-concept is narratively developed from their past and present storied experiences of interactions with parents and teachers at home and schools and from their anticipated career futures. The storied experiences are socially constructed by the traditional Chinese culture and economic structure of Hong Kong. Therefore, from the narrative perspective, the present study enriches our understanding of how students’ self-concept is dynamically developed and evoked throughout their lives. However, this study has a limitation. That is, the participants come from only one SfHEI, which does not possess university status and has majors in two social sciences subject areas, which are community studies and social work, respectively. However, there are three SfHEIs that have gained university status in Hong Kong, and all Hong Kong SfHEIs offer programs in diverse subject disciplines, in addition to social sciences. In general, SfHEIs with university status and some programs such as nursing, that are professionally accredited, are popular with students [43]. In other words, students at that type of SfHEI and/or in those types of programs may have different storied experiences and self-concepts from the students in this study. Therefore, it is recommended that further studies focus on those students in order to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the students’ self-concept development.

This study recommends that the education sector formulate and implement policies and practices that favor sustainable development of the self-concept of students at SfHEIs. First, based on a narrative perspective, the study demonstrates that students’ self-concept is narratively developed. This implies that higher education participators may help students reconfigure their self-concept with narrative counseling or therapy strategies. As Polkinghorne [44] suggests, the purpose of narrative counseling or therapy is to assist people in forming a positive story in which they assume control over their lives by helping people to tell and deconstruct their stories in order to let them understand their problems as external instead of unchangeable parts of their lives, and to encourage them to reform their experiences in an attempt to rediscover their meanings. Second, the government should change the mindset of parents and teachers about education because, as the study shows, they play significant roles in shaping students’ experiences. The government may consider providing education programs or workshops for parents and teachers to facilitate reflection on the meaning of education in order to deemphasize the idea that studying for enrollment in publicly funded universities is the only road to success, and to further emphasize helping students to explore and develop their interests and talents, because there are multiple ways to success. If this works, the grand narrative may eventually change, and in turn, the stories students live by may also change. In this situation, students may not develop negative self-concepts regardless of the type of HEIs at which they study.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, K.K.T. and G.L.; methodology, K.K.T.; formal analysis, K.K.T.; investigation, K.K.T.; writing—original draft preparation, K.K.T. and G.L.; writing—review and editing, H.-h.H.T. and X.W.; project administration, K.K.T.; funding acquisition, X.W. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Education Beijing Noral University (protocol code BNU20210900022, approved by 28 September 2021).

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Data Availability Statement

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to confidentiality and research ethics.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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