We asked 50 people who grew up between countries what university was actually like. Being visibly foreign didn't damage their sense of belonging. Being expected to already be local did — and that happens anywhere you look like you should already fit.
Go abroad for university and you get the whole briefing. You'll stand out. It'll be strange for a while. You'll adjust.
Go back to the country on your passport and nobody briefs you on anything, because what is there to say? You speak the language. You know the food. You're finally going to be among your own people. Everyone tells you it's going to be great.
Then somebody clocks your accent, or the way you phrase a sentence, or the fact that you don't recognise a reference every other eighteen-year-old in the room grew up with. And you are an outsider at home — which nobody prepared you for, because nobody believes it can happen.
So we measured it. Each person rated, from 0 to 10, how often people treated them as foreign in their first year. Separately, how much people expected them to already be local — to know the slang, the references, how things work. Then how much they felt they belonged.
One of those two things predicted belonging. It wasn't the one you get warned about.
Bars are drawn to scale from standardised regression coefficients, both measures entered together. Expected-to-be-local: β = −0.55, p = .002. Treated-as-foreign: β = −0.06, p = .72. Together the two explain about 30% of the variation in how much people belonged. The second number is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Nine to one. The thing TCKs are warned about turned out to be survivable. The thing nobody mentions turned out to be what hurt.
When you are visibly foreign, your difference has a name. There is an international student office, an orientation week built for you, a society you can join, and a set of people in the same position who will find each other by the second week. Being the obvious outsider comes with infrastructure.
When you look local, none of that exists. You hold the passport. You speak the language, probably. Nobody can see that you spent your childhood somewhere else, so nobody is going to explain the things everyone else absorbed at fourteen — the TV references, the school slang, how you're supposed to behave at a party, which things are jokes. You are expected to already know, and the expectation is invisible to everyone except you.
That is the difference the data picked up. One kind of othering is legible. The other is not, and it is the one that costs you.
Two thirds of the people in this study went to university somewhere they hold no passport, and the pattern held for them too. A Zimbabwean at a South African university rated treated as foreign a 1 and expected to be local a 10 — nobody saw him as an outsider, and everybody assumed he already knew how everything worked.
So this isn't a story about going home. It's a story about looking like you belong somewhere you don't. Your passport country is the most extreme version, because there the assumption is total. But it happens in any country near enough to the one you grew up in, any country that shares your language, any country where your face doesn't raise a question.
“How hard it was to make local friends even though I grew up in Spain.”
Which means the question worth asking about any university — not just the ones back home — is not will I stand out here. It's will this place assume I already know how it works.
The survey never mentioned reverse culture shock. It never offered the phrase, never hinted at the idea, never suggested that going home might be hard. It asked open questions and left the box empty. These three had never met.
“I wish someone had told me that returning to your passport country can be a culture shock too. I expected adapting to university to be difficult, but I didn't expect to feel somewhat foreign in a country I considered my own.”
“Even though I hold a British passport, having grown up abroad made me feel surprisingly like an outsider at first. People who grew up entirely in the UK had very different shared pop-culture references from my childhood.”
“Moving back to your home country doesn't automatically mean you'll instantly feel like you belong just because you share a passport. It takes time to bridge the gap between the culture you grew up in and the local culture.”
Three strangers, three continents, one idea none of them had a name for until they wrote it down. That convergence is the finding. The statistics above only confirm it.
We asked two more questions, side by side: how was it academically, and how was it socially. Among the people who went to university in their own passport country, the answers came apart.
A gap of 1.3 points on the same ten-point scale, from the same people, about the same institution — and unlikely to be chance (p = .028). The university delivered what it advertised. It did not deliver the other thing, and the other thing is not on any ranking table.
“No, even though I did well academically, I still felt like I did not belong.”
This is the entire reason TCKHuman exists. Rankings measure the part that went fine.
This is early work and we'd rather show you its edges than oversell it.
The coding rules and the inclusion criterion were written down and fixed before the results were examined, so the analysis could be checked rather than taken on trust. A larger confirmatory round is planned.
Fifty people isn't enough, and we know it. The point of this isn't the study — it's building the thing that should have existed before any of us picked a university: honest reviews of what a place is actually like socially, written by TCKs who went there.
If you grew up between countries and you've been to university, tell us about yours. It takes about twelve minutes, the questions are the same ones above, and your answers go into the review of that university.
Review your universityAnonymous unless you choose otherwise. Nothing is published without permission.