ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicMental Health Challenges in Vulnerable Groups: Psychological Well-Being, Learning, and Support in Disadvantaged ContextsView all 19 articles
Refining the employability of university students from low-income families: A qualitative study on the influential factors and mechanism of employability
Provisionally accepted
- 1Jilin Normal University, Siping, China
- 2University College London, London, United Kingdom
- 3Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
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Using reflexive thematic analysis of eleven interviews, this study examined how university students from low‑income families acquire employability. Nineteen sub‑themes converged into four higher‑order themes: psychological capital, resource‑compensatory proactivity, goal clarity, and capability enactment. Psychological capital (self‑efficacy and optimism) energized proactive behaviors. These behaviors sharpened career goals, which in turn prompted deliberate practice that strengthened learning, resilience and socio‑communicative skills. These internal processes unfold within external family and university contexts, including economic status, prestige‑based university stratification, teachers' guidance, seniors' experience transfer, extracurricular participation, and internships and part‑time work, which act as filters or scaffolds. The themes form a dynamic sequence connecting these four themes with mastery experiences feeding back to strengthen self‑ efficacy and optimism. The resulting conceptual model localizes Social Cognitive Career Theory to a low‑socioeconomic status setting and shows that bolstering psychological resources and engineering opportunity structures are jointly necessary to convert motivation into demonstrable employability.
Keywords: employability, low-income families, Psychological Capital, SocialCognitive Career Theory, university students
Received: 03 Oct 2025; Accepted: 22 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Wang, Liu, Duan, Liang, Wu, Zhang and Chao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Bohan Liu
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