Fragile success under disadvantage: Dynamic pathways of academic resilience among low-SES students in China

Cross-sectional research on academic resilience often identifies “low-SES but high-performing” students, offering limited insight into changes in high-performance status. Using two-wave longitudinal data from the China Education Panel Survey (2013–2015), this study classified 2867 low-SES junior high school students into four pathways: persistent non-high performance, resilience growth, sustained high performance, and fragile high performance. Fragile high performance denotes the observed transition from W1 high to W2 non-high performance under the adopted percentile-based definition. Low-SES students had lower entry and maintenance rates and a higher exit rate than middle- and high-SES peers. Machine-learning analyses showed that the incremental predictive value of baseline information differed across transitions, with the largest improvement for resilience growth. Baseline achievement position provided substantial predictive information, but full models outperformed percentile-position benchmarks. These findings show that equity-oriented educational evaluation should consider both disadvantaged students’ access to high performance and the stability of that status over time.