Self‐Abandonment or Seeking a Way Out: Understanding Educational Expectations Among Chinese Migrant Children

ABSTRACT Existing studies have primarily focused on migrant children's compulsory education, academic performance, and psychological wellbeing. Less attention has been paid to how migrant children themselves perceive, negotiate, and adjust their educational expectations towards the end of compulsory education under unequal institutional conditions. This study explores the complex process through which migrant children's educational expectations are formed and negotiated in urban China. Drawing on 51 interviews with migrant children, their parents, teachers and school principal in Shanghai, it examines how field, capitals and habitus shape this process at the end of the compulsory education. The findings show that some migrant children replicated their family members' perspectives and practices and adjusted their expectations under the restrictions of the policies. School classification practices as institutional habitus further differentiated migrant children's educational expectations, whereas others became incorporated into the muddling through culture within migrant children's classes. The study also shows that tensions between familial habitus and institutional habitus generated ambivalence in educational decision‐making, leading migrant children to negotiate, compromise, or strategically adjust their future educational trajectories.