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2023 Vol.232023 Vol.232023 Vol.233their high schools. The students tended to uncritically accept their high school teachers’ guidance with respect to whether to attend university, where to study, and what to study. Students received little to no guidance about why they should attend university, or what they would gain either from attending university or from their choice of major. Notably, most high schools seemed to emphasize ease of entry over other factors: students were encouraged to choose entrance methods, universities, and courses of study with the highest chance of acceptance above questions of suitability or interest. What this means is that these students learned ways of thinking that were actively detrimental to their success at university from the two institutions (family and secondary education) that are arguably the most important for learning these logics. Academic success at university requires proactive participation and management of study, and the successful transition to higher education likewise requires active engagement with the university community socially. The passive approaches learned from the family and secondary schools are actively working against these goals. These approaches to thinking about education are deeply-ingrained ways of thinking. As institutional logics, they are unconscious and unexamined, and will remain so without conscious and respectful guidance from the “institution” of the university.Navigating the Transition to Higher Education Thus it falls on the university to help guide these students to success. It is important to consider that, theory of “Institutional Logics,”inherited ways of thinking and approaches to the world. She theorizes that the institutions in which we live (primarily family and educational institutions, but also religion and the state) both guide and limit the ways we are capable of thinking about the world, making it difficult for us to understand ways of thinking and acting that are outside of these received “logics”. These three ideas together suggest that, especially at lower-prestige institutions, more and more students are entering university ill-prepared for the transition from secondary to higher education, not only academically as many university faculty will be aware, but socially; and that the first one to three months of the university experience are critical to these students’ success, in terms of the decision to continue university study. As Chubu University’s Department of English Language and Culture is a relatively low-prestige department, facing (anecdotally) more and more students who are less well-prepared both academically and socially for university, and (at the time the research began) a worryingly high drop-out rate, these theories seemed a useful framework to approach the question of student success in this department.The Research The research consisted primarily of surveys and interviews with first-year students in the Department of English Language and Culture. Surveys were given to all students in the cohort, with the goal of targeting students with self-reported social or academic struggles in their first semester. 34 students elected to take the survey, and of these ten were selected for the second stage of the research, individual interviews, on the basis of reported academic struggles and thoughts of leaving university. The interviews focused on questions about the students’ social and academic experiences in high school and in the home leading to university, and their social and academic experiences in their first semester here. Interviews were conducted in Japanese; all translations to English are my own.Findings: Learned Behaviors and Approaches to Education All ten students had much in common: many were first-generation students, and most of the rest had only a single parent who had attended (usually the father), many of whom had not finished their university education. Commonalities were found in their experiences at home, at secondary school, and socially after beginning university. From their parents, most of the students seem to have inherited logics of passivity with respect to education. Most parents left important decisions about education to the high school; whether to attend university, where to attend, and what to study were not generally discussed with the parents. Parents showed little interest in the specifics of their children’s education, either leading up to university or after they entered. Much of this, of course, can be attributed to the students’ status as first-generation students̶parents likely felt they had little advice or guidance to offer̶but the approaches to education were learned all the same. Most of the students seem to have learned similar logics of passivity from