The paper engages with the growing number of discourses and initiatives revolving around higher education (HE) students’ well-being, which we situate in conjunction with a changed conception of the role, purpose, and governance of the university. 

We start from the position that ‘problems’ with students’ well-being are not given but social and discursive constructions that carry particular ways of defining problems and solutions, and that we must pay particular attention to problematisation, that is, what the problem is constructed to be (Bacchi, 2009). Based on empirical examples from recent policy and practice developments in Denmark and the United Kingdom, our analysis shows how the well-being agenda entrenches and furthers a psychological language in higher education. So, at a general level student ‘well-being’ is constructed as a psychological rather than, say, sociological or pedagogical problem. In one way, this language appears well-aligned with dominant student-centered learning tropes. However, it can also be seen as a further individualisation of structural challenges because it shifts the educational point of gravity from being about students’ knowledge and learning to a focus on the mindsets, attitudes and emotions with which students approach themselves and their learning. 

The analysis builds on a post-structuralist policy analytical framework that invites us to consider how the ‘psy-disciplines’ play out in higher educational institutions and contexts (Foucault, 1977, 2001; Petersen and Millei, 2015; Zembylas, 2021). The psy-disciplines were and are not only about inserting and stabilising a new language, but it was also always and continues to be a form of governmentality, a conduct of conduct (Rose, 1998). When recent responses to the student well-being crisis, at policy level and through recent response initiatives, project student mental health as a significant new responsibility for higher education, it shifts how the role and purpose of higher education is conceived, from engagement in matter and competencies (Biesta, 2021) to developing, quite explicitly, politically desired psychological dispositions, emotions, and attitudes.

In the first part of the paper, we depict how the well-being of higher education students over the last 5-10 years has been constructed as a problem in higher education. We take recent Danish policies (Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Research, 2017, 2019, 2019b; 2020) as an empirical starting point for unraveling a wider international tendency and draw parallels to international policies, e.g., from the World Economic Forum. In the second part of the paper, we draw attention to three specific examples of responses or ‘solutions’ to the well-being ‘problem’ which, in different ways, project new ways of thinking about the role and purpose of the university hand in hand with a new figure of the desired student, who is increasingly depicted in terms of psychological dispositions. The three examples are: 1) THE LEARNING QUESTIONNAIRE, which is a new nationwide student survey, introduced by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Research in 2019 (https://ufm.dk/en/education/OLDfocus-areas/laeringsbarometer/information-about-the-survey). The questionnaire is modeled after similar student surveys in other countries, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement (USA), National Student Survey (UK) and HowULearn (Finland), but the Danish version stands out in that students’ responses about their well-being may determine up to 5 percent of the institutional basic grants for education. 2) STUDENT MINDS, which is a UK-based student mental health charity that seeks to “empower students and members of the university community to look after their own mental health, support others and create change” (https://www.studentminds.org.uk/). 3) HOWDY.CARE, which is a digital tool that monitors students’ mental and physical wellbeing and provides both students and their institutions with feedback about the students’ scores (https://howdy.care/product/). The examples of initiatives are selected for their power to enable a critical assessment of currently available responses and tools. They are not necessarily representative of all initiatives currently being developed in higher education contexts around the globe. Yet while the examples we bring forth here are different on the face of it, they carry similar constructions of the ‘problem’ and similar forms of ‘solution’, particularly through recourse to positive psychology.

The paper contributes to the research on HE students’ well-being (e.g., Dinter et al., 2011; Parpala et al., 2013; Pekrun et al., 2011; Wulf-Andersen & Larsen, 2021) by challenging the idea that policies and practices react to pre-existing problems, and instead it argues that these policies and practices are also active in producing those ‘problemsʼ as well as legitimising politically desirable ‘solutions’ (Shore & Wright, 2011). By drawing attention to the co-constitutive effects of diverse responses to the so-called well-being crisis in HE our analysis sheds light on the ways in which it can also be seen as a mode of governance that invisibly propels important normative shifts in how we think and talk about the good student, teacher, and institution. First, our analysis shows a new responsibilisation of teachers and institutions for how students ‘feel’ rather than what they learn is currently taking place. Second, regardless of their different forms and origin, the three well-being initiatives presented in the analysis are colonised by the language of positive psychology, that is, a particular school of psychology that focuses on the individual’s’ ‘self-efficacy’ or ‘resilience’ towards outer challenges, and which goes hand in hand with a new depiction of ‘the good student’ as one who is willing to and capable of developing the desired positive ‘growth mindset’. This mindset, we argue, can be seen as a new hidden curriculum that transforms the university and its population in remarkable and perhaps unforeseen ways.

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