# Refining the employability of university students from low-income families: a qualitative study on the influential factors and mechanism of employability

## TL;DR

This study explores how university students from low-income families develop employability, focusing on psychological resources and contextual factors.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a conceptual model linking psychological capital and contextual factors to employability in low-income students.

## Key findings

- Psychological resources like self-efficacy and optimism drive proactive behaviors and goal clarity.
- Contextual factors such as economic constraints and university support act as filters or scaffolds for employability development.
- Mastery experiences reinforce psychological resources, creating a feedback loop for employability.

## Abstract

Graduate employability is increasingly emphasized in higher education, yet how students from low-income families develop employability remains under-theorized, particularly regarding the interplay between psychological resources and contextual constraints.

Using reflexive thematic analysis, we analyzed semi-structured interviews with 11 university students from low-income families to examine perceived influences and mechanisms underlying employability development.

Nineteen sub-themes converged into four higher-order themes: psychological capital, resource-compensatory proactivity, goal clarity, and capability enactment. Self-efficacy and optimism energized proactive behaviors that sharpened career goals. Goal clarity then prompted deliberate practice that strengthened learning and self-management, resilience, and socio-communicative skills. These processes unfolded within family and university contexts, including economic constraint, prestige-based stratification, teachers’ guidance, seniors’ experience transfer, extracurricular participation, and internship and part-time work, which operated as filters or scaffolds. Mastery experiences further fed back to reinforce self-efficacy and optimism.

The resulting conceptual model localizes Social Cognitive Career Theory to a low-socioeconomic-status setting and suggests that strengthening psychological resources and engineering opportunity structures are jointly necessary for translating motivation into demonstrable employability.