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

Introduction: 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. Methods: 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. Results: 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. Conclusion: 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.