Angels falling from grace? The rectification experiences of middle-class community-college students in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Against an expanded sector of higher education, inadequate empirical effort has been made to examine the experiences of middle-class students who fail to get straight into university rectify their situation. Such experiences, as well as their psychic/emotional aspects, are of increasing relevance to understanding the operation of class against a changing landscape of higher education and thus explaining the persistence of a class gap despite continuous educational expansion. In filling this empirical gap, this article examines the educational experiences of 16 middle-class community-college students in seeking a second chance in Hong Kong, and discusses how far the students could be seen as ‘angels falling from grace’. Their educational experiences showed that they were advantaged like ‘angels’ receiving an abundance of parental support in seeking this second chance; but, feeling negatively about community college, they saw themselves as ‘angels falling from grace’. Despite this, they finally successfully steered themselves to university.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotions
• entitlement
• Hong Kong
• middle class
• second chance

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the University of Macau for the financial support, which supports a follow-up study for the study of community-college students in Hong Kong. And, I would like to thank the respondents of the study; but for their generosity sharing with me their stories and feelings, this study, let alone this article, would not have been possible. I would also like to thank two former colleagues of mine who kindly referred to me qualified respondents for this study. At last, but not the least, I would like to thank a journal editor and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Yi-Lee Wong http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8934-2853

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universidade de Macau (start-up research grant 2010-2011).