This study examines narratives in which students describe challenges they faced in higher education due to low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds and the strategies they used to overcome them. Using computational text analysis, we operationalize three educational theories, Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, and Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital and Habitus to analyze patterns in these narratives. To strengthen the theory-to-method connection, we incorporate temporal timeline extraction, identifying ordered event sequences and tracking how challenges and forms of capital evolve across a student’s posting history. This temporal lens links theoretical categories (barriers, supports, forms of capital) to when they occur, highlighting moments for timely interventions. By combining theory-driven features with temporal analysis, we evaluate the explanatory capacity of each framework and demonstrate how computational methods can quantitatively examine qualitative lived experience at scale, supporting interdisciplinary research on equity in education.