The subject of the study is the sources of protest moods of modern student youth. The research interest in protest moods is due to the fact that they are a latent stage of open protest actions, and their study provides an opportunity to regulate open protest: reducing its negative effects and increasing the positive ones. This article pays special attention to such a social group as youth. This is due to the fact that it is young people who are most often the main participants in protest actions due to their more acute perception of the imperfections of society and inflated expectations from themselves and others. The novelty of the study was to understand protest moods as one of the stages of the development of social protest. A methodology was developed and a sociological study was conducted among students of the Altai Territory, the purpose of which was to characterize the main sources of protest moods in the student environment. The research was implemented through a combination of quantitative (mass survey) and qualitative (in-depth interview and focus group) methods of collecting, processing and analyzing sociological information. The main conclusions of the study were the understanding of the sources of protest moods in the student environment as a combination of a number of factors: the conditions of the learning environment, relationships with the external environment, as well as the socio-economic and political situation in the state