The Pathway to Excellence: Social Capital and the Growth of Top Students

Abstract

The past decades witnessed the rapid expansion of higher education worldwide. The great leap forward of Chinese higher education and the increase of college students’ population raised great concerns of researchers on the issues of higher education quality. At the core of the quality issue should be the development of college students which is the central task of colleges and universities. Although there has been much research about student development in colleges and universities, there is still a lack of research which looks at the patterns of social relations that students embodied and its impact on students’ development. This study tries to examine the impact of social relations that students embodied on their growth through using the lens of social capital. Through in-depth interviewing with 17 top students in E university of S city, the author found that students can obtain different emotional and instrumental resources through different kind of social network. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it distinguishes different networks and their respective potentials for students’ development. Furthermore, it also reminds us that colleges and universities should help students to get access to more social capital through creating network-abundant campus.