How Educational Excellence Becomes Part of the Self: The Formation of the Excellent Self among Students from Relatively Less Advantaged Backgrounds in Chinese Competitive Universities

Educational excellence is commonly understood as high academic achievement, ability, or educational success. Existing research has primarily examined who achieves excellence and how educational excellence facilitates social mobility, while paying less attention to how excellence gradually becomes part of students’ self-understanding. Drawing on the sociology of education, this study adopts an educational life-history approach combined with semi-structured interviews to investigate six students from relatively less advantaged backgrounds who achieved sustained educational success in competitive Chinese universities. It explores how educational excellence becomes incorporated into the self and how it is subsequently organized, maintained, and renegotiated across university, postgraduate recommendation, and working life. The findings show that educational excellence is not a stable personal trait but an ongoing process of self-formation. Before entering competitive universities, repeated recognition from families and schools transformed academic achievement into a language through which participants understood their abilities, responsibilities, and future possibilities. After entering competitive universities, multidimensional evaluation systems—including comprehensive assessment, postgraduate recommendation, research, and extracurricular achievements—further organized excellence into a continuing logic of action, gradually transforming external evaluation into self-monitoring. During postgraduate study and employment, earlier educational success generated path dependence and sustained self-discipline through repeated experiences of competence and control. However, when educational success became misaligned with lived experience, some participants began to renegotiate the meaning of excellence through new relationships, embodied practices, and alternative life choices, thereby reconstructing the relationship between evaluation and the self. This study proposes the concept of an excellence-oriented habitus to explain how educational excellence becomes a durable orientation toward perception, judgement, and action through continuous recognition across educational life. Rather than viewing excellence merely as an educational outcome, the study conceptualizes it as a socially produced relationship to the self. It further argues that the fundamental issue of educational evaluation lies not in evaluation itself, but in the gradual expansion of task evaluation into personality evaluation. Educational excellence, which should remain one possible form of self-realization, is instead experienced as a condition of security and future survival. As educational life becomes increasingly organized around successive tasks, opportunities for reflecting on the purposes and meanings of life are continually postponed. Education should therefore cultivate not only individuals capable of achieving excellence, but also individuals capable of reflecting upon why they pursue particular ways of living.