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Cyberspace has become a fixture of contemporary higher education institutions. When facing challenges seeking admission to a foreign university, international students often resort to online resources for guidance. By engaging in these online activities, international students develop a sense of community and identity. Despite recent advancement, existing studies on digital space and international students often fail to address the contentious nature of the community-forming process. Using digital ethnography and interviews, I studied an online forum for Taiwanese international students, STUDYABROAD, to delineate how social networking sites (SNSs) help reinforce group boundaries relating to different class traits and individual characteristics. International students find support and reassurance by socializing with netizen members and learning essential knowledge and information, but they also learn to distinguish different personalities and associate with them based on how they are perceived. By describing how Taiwanese students interpret online forums and develop norms around those communities, this study contributes to a growing strand of research into socialization of the international online community.

The meritocratic ideal prescribes that universities should admit students based on academic ability and individual effort. Yet as competition for scarce slots has increased, markets for services to improve the odds of admission have expanded. We use the case of a popular online forum for elite Taiwanese students seeking graduate study in the United States to argue that the moral values assigned to such markets provide useful information about the status of the meritocratic ideal. Using digital ethnography and interviews with forum participants, we find that individuals moralize markets for admissions services in ways that align with their social position. They valorize participation in markets that compensate for their "unfair" disadvantage around English while rejecting the legitimacy of adjacent markets that compensate for lack of cultural capital (which they possess). More generally, we argue that although individuals who benefit from meritocracy will tend to stigmatize associated markets, the positive moralization of such markets can reflect local contests over how meritocracy should be defined--yet not necessarily undermine the meritocratic ideal.