‘When everyone plays it safe’: disaggregating youth agency among elite university students in China

Across many societies, youth transitions to adulthood are increasingly shaped by structural uncertainty. Economic restructuring, credential inflation, precarious employment, and slowing social mobility have weakened previously predictable pathways into the future, prompting renewed attention to how young people navigate uncertainty through agency. Building on the Capability Approach, we conceptualize agency as socially situated and develop a disaggregated framework comprising three interconnected dimensions: aspiration, adaptation, and influence. Drawing on in-depth interviews with students at one of China’s elite universities, we show that structural uncertainty reorganizes youth agency unevenly across these dimensions. Students recalibrate their aspirations toward stability and risk management, intensify adaptation to institutionally sanctioned pathways of achievement, and increasingly relocate, rescale, and defer their capacity to shape broader social conditions. More importantly, structural uncertainty reorganizes agency through substitution rather than mutual reinforcement across these dimensions. As adaptation becomes more central to agency, the influence dimension contracts, even among young people who possess considerable educational and institutional advantages, raising broader questions about the long-term consequences of structural uncertainty for social change.