Fostering Student Well-being in Higher Education

Abstract

1 the ability of people or things to feel better quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, etc.2 the ability of a substance to return to its original shape after it has been bent, stretched, or pressed -cited from Oxford English and Oxford Learner' s Dictionaries i 2 Chapter 1 | Introduction At Dutch universities, students face performance pressure, heavy workloads, uncertainties, and ambiguities in their studies. Consequently -and not surprisingly -they report substantial levels of depression, stress, and anxiety. Adding a global pandemic to the mix certainly does not decrease such struggles. These findings emerge from reports issued by national institutes such as the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (Nationaal Regieorgaan Onderwijsonderzoek) and the Trimbos Institute for Mental Health (e.g., Deunk & Korpershoek, 2021;Dopmeijer et al., 2021Dopmeijer et al., , 2023. In response to these insights, the Dutch government has announced it will invest more in students' wellbeing by focussing on stress prevention and encouraging open discussions about mental well-being (Rijksoverheid, 2023). This dissertation aims to contribute to such conversations about students' wellbeing in Dutch higher education.Students' well-being has long been defined by the absence of negative health; more recently however, the positive psychology movement focussed on students' positive well-being, highlighting the presence of mental and physical health (e.g., Seligman et al., 2009). Nevertheless, positive psychology remains a relatively new notion in general educational and psychological research, counting less than 30 years of active consideration. It was only in the late 1990s that Martin Seligman introduced and brought the concept into the focus of the American Psychology Association (for further insights, see Seligman, 2010;Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000;Seligman et al., 2009).Higher education research has extensively investigated university students' well-being, often from a deficit-oriented perspective. Such studies place university students in a particularly vulnerable position, marked by academic under-preparedness, financial insecurity, social isolation, and poor physical health (e.g.,