The theory of cultural capital has long been applied to explain academic achievement. This qualitative study investigated first-year students in higher vocational colleges and, taking this low cultural capital group as an example, explored how cultural capital has affected their past teacher–student interactions. Participants described their experience of interacting with their teachers. We found that these students primarily experienced authoritative and laissez-faire teacher–student interactions. Students’ embodied and institutionalized cultural capital profoundly affected different aspects of the teacher–student interaction. In modern China, vocational and academic education are of the same status, so teachers should modify their evaluations based solely on academic achievement. When interacting with students, teachers should be more understanding and interact in a more student-centred way. Teacher training programmes should also be reformed, and training for teachers in general and vocational schools should be distinguished.

Habitus is a concept from Bourdieu’s theories that plays a key role in explaining individuals’ behaviours. The social reputation and recognition of vocational education in modern China are declining, and vocational college students are bearing a negative stigma, although they have a positive learning behaviour toward academic education. The aim of this study was to examine those students’ previous life experiences, especially in the education field. The main research questions are as follows: (1) How does the individual’s experience construct his or her learning habitus? (2) How does their learning habitus change their learning behaviours? The findings show that the interaction between participants and their parents and teachers mainly leads to the construction of learning habitus, that is, to pursue the success of academic education. Even though they originate from the working class, with less cultural capital and poor academic performance, this does not mean that they have negative learning behaviours. Therefore, it is necessary to give objective and fair evaluations to higher vocational students and address educational inequity problems.