Education agents are organisations and/or individuals who provide a range of services in exchange for a fee from their service users,  including overseas higher education institutions and/or students who will study or are studying abroad (Nikula & Kivistö, 2018; Krasocki, 2002). In the marketized international higher education sector, education agents appear to play an increasingly important role in the fierce international student recruitment campaign (BUILA, 2021). Accordingly, there are an increasing number of studies on education agents such as the role of education agents in international students’ decision-making (Feng & Horta, 2021; Robinson-Pant & Magyar, 2018; Hagedorn & Zhang, 2011) and the relationship between agents and overseas universities (Nikula, 2022; Huang et al., 2020). However, there remains a significant gap in our knowledge of the underlying meaning of the wide use of education agents to international students, universities, policymakers, and other stakeholders. Therefore, this article aims to understand the meaning of using education agents widely by exploring the collective beliefs and practices of prospective Chinese international students who used an education agent (Chinese agent-user applicants) over the course of their application for UK postgraduate taught (PGT) programmes. This article draws on longitudinal semi-structured interviews with 10 Chinese agent-user applicants from November 2020 to June 2021 and uses Bourdieu’s concept of doxa to analyse the data. Doxa refers to the collective beliefs, opinions, assumptions, and norms about the appropriate practices that everyone in the field is conscious of yet does not question (Bourdieu, 1977). In Bourdieu’s terms, doxa is a form of recognition of legitimacy through the ‘misrecognition of arbitrariness’ (1977, p. 168). That is, part of the rules that do not serve to usefully function within the field, are misrecognised as common sense of the field (Williams & Choudry, 2016). In this study, my initial analysis suggests that the practice of using an education agent becomes many Chinese agent-user applicants’ ‘pre-reflexive intuitive knowledge’ ​​(Deer, 2008, p.120), When forming their intention to study abroad, many Chinese students tend to glean related information through different channels including education agents, recommendations from families and alumni, social media, university websites, online forum/academic community, specific mobile applications, and online search engines. These channels all routed them towards using an education agent (Yang, 2021). Their routine practices thus led me to employ Bourdieu’s concept of doxa to explore what Chinese agent-user applicants learned and did in the application process. 

This article emanated from a project (Yang et al., 2023) exploring Chinese international students’ application experiences to UK PGT programmes via education agents. The project used a longitudinal interpretative phenomenological analysis approach (Smith et al., 2009), to understand Chinese international students’ application experiences with education agents, the meaning of the experiences to individual students, and to explore how the individuals make sense of these experiences. The criteria for participation are that the participants need: 1. to be Chinese students who pursued their undergraduate programme in China or other countries and applied to UK PGT programme(s) commencing in September 2021; 2. to have used or be currently using or considering using an agent (including any-scale agent or any business-model agent). Ultimately, the purposive sample of ten participants was generated. I conducted four rounds of semi-structured interviews, corresponding to the four key stages of application suggested in the findings of an earlier study (Yang et al., 2020), with each participant in Chinese online and recorded them, as outlined in table 2. Each interview took around 2 hours. Overall, there are 40 interviews and around 80 hours. The first interview questions focused on education background, socio-economic background, motivation for studying abroad, choice of countries, agents, and programmes, time, expectations of education agents, agents’ services and so on. The follow-up interview questions were unstructured and based on participants’ ongoing application process and were tailored to individuals. The project used six-step IPA data analysis (Smith et al., 2009). I firstly read through each transcript whilst listening to recordings and watching videos, along with making notes and comments. The transcripts were then further annotated in the subsequent readings before developing emergent themes by uploading transcripts into NVivo, creating nodes based on the earlier notes and comments, as well as merging or segregating the initial nodes. Subsequently, I identified differences, similarities and connections across the four interviews of the case. Based on the analysis for the project (Yang et al., 2023), I took the above two research questions and went back to the transcripts again, teased out each participant’s quotes associated with taken-for-granted assumptions/beliefs/practices for further analysis, and then developed three themes discussed further in the following section. Finally, I conducted member checking to confirm the meanings of data are consistent with participants’ interpretations.

The findings suggest that education agents are collectively regarded as having their established routine procedure of application, which serves to formulate Chinese students’ “successful” application trajectory that succeeds the position of prior applicants over time. Shui courses, “watered-down” courses, analogous to “Easy A courses” in American slang, in the minds of my participants, clearly represent courses having little to do with interests or expertise but more with obtaining satisfying grades without much effort (Chen, 2018). Chinese agent-user applicants take it for granted that they should choose an education agent, and boost scores by (re)taking Shui courses with their agents’ guidance. In parallel, UK universities are collectively perceived to open some Shui programmes at the PGT level. Those are PGT courses that are less competitive but provided by high-ranked universities. In the application game, many Chinese applicants are ineligible for some programmes at top-ranked universities in the UK (basically referring to the universities ranked top 100 on QS rankings) due to the relatively low ranking of their undergraduate universities. Notwithstanding, getting into prestigious UK universities is still possible with the help of an agent by applying for overseas Shui programmes. Those are PGT courses that are less competitive but provided by high-ranked universities. This article implies that education agents who play as a symbolic dominant in the application game to overseas programmes, ostensibly work for Chinese agent-user applicants to facilitate their applications and advance their position in the game, but in fact, serve to consolidate the hierarchies of UK universities by stimulating application numbers through doxa.

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