Students entering higher music education often experience discontinuity when moving from secondary school to university. This reflects a structural tension widely recognised in global music education, where intensive practical training is not always matched by explicit academic expectations, theoretical understanding, and scholarly development. This study examines how first-year transition is institutionally shaped through the interaction of curriculum structures, pedagogical routines, and student support. Using an institutional and contextual perspective, it compares transition design across China and New Zealand to explore how institutional priorities and teaching cultures shape students' early learning experiences and adaptation strategies. Conceptually, the first-year transition is framed as a designed educational ecology, an institutional outcome shaped by the interaction between programme structures, assessment and feedback practices, and support pathways. Transition is understood not only as an individual process of adaptation but also as an institutional accomplishment emerging from the relationship between educational design, teaching culture, and everyday learning practice. A multi-level analytic approach links system-level conditions, programme design, and classroom processes to trace how expectations are communicated, how standards become visible or remain implicit, and how help-seeking is enabled or constrained in practice. Methodologically, the research adopts an explanatory mixed-methods comparative case design guided by purposeful triangulation. Data include semi-structured interviews with lecturers and curriculum leaders to investigate assessment cultures, pedagogical decision-making, and programme intentions; interviews with student support and service staff to understand how support mechanisms operate in practice and how accessible they are to first-year students; and student questionnaires measuring belonging, academic confidence, perceived support, and wellbeing. Data collection is underway in China. The questionnaire has been distributed to the first-year cohort at the participating institution, with an eligible cohort of 267 students and 136 responses to date, alongside initial interviews with two lecturers and three student support and service staff. A second wave in March 2026, aligned with the return to teaching after the break, will strengthen subgroup coverage and enable follow-up interviews guided by emerging themes, including perspectives that are less visible in the initial dataset, to refine developing explanations. New Zealand fieldwork will commence in late April 2026 at Victoria University of Wellington during Trimester 1. Interviews will be conducted during teaching weeks, and the student questionnaire will be administered in late June immediately after the final assessment period to reduce assessment-related burden and support whole-trimester reflection. Analyses prioritise interpretive comparison and a focus on mechanisms rather than statistical inference. Integration will be conducted through within-case analysis and cross-case comparison, linking survey patterns with interview accounts of institutional practices. These potential mechanisms will be examined by triangulating interview accounts of programme and support practices with students' reported experiences in the questionnaire. Preliminary materials indicate that two institutional mechanisms warrant focused comparison for making expectations clearer and support more accessible in the first year. The first is assessment and feedback alignment. This refers to how criteria, exemplars, feedback timing, and opportunities for formative dialogue help render standards explicit across studio-based and academically oriented subjects. The second is embedded support pathways. This refers to whether advising and support are connected to curricular checkpoints such as early assessments, required learning activities, and programme milestones rather than relying primarily on student self-referral. These mechanisms are examined as potential explanations for variation in students' academic confidence, sense of belonging, and perceived support during the first year. They are interpreted in relation to local teaching cultures, including informal and relational forms of guidance, rather than treated as universal standards of effective transition design. By specifying and comparing how these mechanisms operate across the two contexts studied, the research will develop a concise analytical framework for transition design in higher music education, linking curriculum coherence, feedback practices, and support accessibility as interacting components of an institutional ecology. The study will offer practical implications for strengthening first-year curriculum design, teaching routines, and student support.