The increasing number of studies on the wellbeing of university students (e.g. Baik et al. 2019; Dodd et al. 2021; Jones et al. 2021), and even more specifically on the wellbeing of international students (Alharbi & Smith 2018; Larcombe et al. 2024; Soong & Maheepala 2023) - as a group of students facing specific barriers, limitations, but also demands- demonstrates the relevance and urgency that this topic claims in the higher education discourse. This article contributes to the growing body of research on student wellbeing by focusing specifically on the interplay between educational and personal subjective wellbeing, based on the theoretical model of Having, Loving, Being (Allardt 1993). The aim of this study is to use a sociological rather than a psychological concept of subjective wellbeing to explain when and how educational wellbeing becomes relevant to personal wellbeing and vice versa for postgraduate students in higher education institutions abroad.

This article draws on existing work on the interplay between personal and professional wellbeing among highly skilled immigrants (Author 2025), but will apply it in an educational rather than a professional context. This also allows the existing approach to be extended to another social sphere (Bourdieu 2005) and to gain insights into the differences between educational and professional wellbeing in relation to personal wellbeing. The theoretical starting point is that subjective personal wellbeing is valuable and desirable in itself and is associated with overwhelmingly positive outcomes for other aspects of life (De Neve et al. 2013; Nikolova & Graham 2015). Subjective wellbeing includes a rational and emotional dimension, but does not make an important distinction because they contribute to an individual's subjective wellbeing (Allardt 1993; Veenhoven 2008). Subjective wellbeing is not only the absence of suffering, but also the presence of positive experiences and feelings. It is about feeling good and being satisfied with life. Specifically, it is defined by Allardt's three basic conditions for human flourishing: Having, Loving, Being (HLB).

This approach is suitable for the research question because it emphasises the relational character of economic-materialistic needs and incorporates complex social needs. It is therefore a viable option for exploring the relationships between educational and personal wellbeing. 'Having' refers to material conditions in terms of economic resources, housing, employment, health, education, security, social and legal rights. These material conditions are necessary to avoid deprivation and provide the basis for survival by meeting basic needs and providing protection (Allardt 1993). 'Loving' is materialised in attachments to family and kin, friendships, local communities, fellow members of organisations and associations, colleagues at work - in short, social connections and relationships. 'Being' captures the need to become an integral part of society and to live in harmony with one's surroundings, with personal growth and self-realisation as a potentially positive outcome and alienation as a potentially negative outcome. 'Being' is expressed in terms of the degree of agency and influence a person can exercise over their own life, opportunities for a meaningful working life, opportunities for leisure activities and having a voice in society and politics. These three conditions must be met for subjective wellbeing to be fully understood and realised. Subjective wellbeing can be found in both the educational and private spheres of an individual. Studying their interplay therefore becomes an important objective, especially if we want to understand the wellbeing of international students, whose lives are firmly embedded in education, but who also face particular wellbeing circumstances (Amit & Riss 2014; Hendriks 2015).

The qualitative study draws its data from two research projects on doctoral and masters students respectively. In both projects, participants were interviewed by the author using a combination of open-ended narrative questions and topic-centred questions. This allows for meaningful cross-coding and analysis (Troman & Jeffrey 2007). In both groups, respondents talked extensively about their educational pathways, their migration experiences, and their contentment with their past choices and present lives. The combined sample consists of 69 German-born master's and doctoral students studying full-time abroad in the fields of medicine, social sciences and humanities. The NVivo coding was theoretically informed around wellbeing, but how wellbeing was concretely understood was left open to each participant's narrative, respecting their view of themselves (Campbell et al. 2013). The multiple responses collected were then transformed into open coding, which generated a large number of codes (Strauss & Corbin 1990). The theoretical underpinning of HLB helps to code and interpret the findings without relying on an overly psychological understanding of wellbeing in an abductive empirical approach (Saldaña 2021). The coding and analysis process leads to the identification of several key insights about subjective wellbeing at the crossroads of its personal and educational dimensions. The article will not discuss wellbeing in cases where it has been limited to one of the two dimensions (of which there are also many insights in the data), but will look strictly at the interplay between the two. The findings are presented at a higher level of abstraction in a series of 'crossroads', each summarising a specific context and situation of interplay between educational and personal wellbeing within the framework of Having, Loving, Being (Allardt 1993).

As this article is still in a very early stage, there are no empirical findings yet to present. However, the previous work on the interplay between personal and professional wellbeing among highly skilled immigrants (Author 2025) identified four patterns that became central for the mutual influence of professional and personal wellbeing: Alienation at the workplace, autonomy and spatial flexibility of work, country-specific work-life balance, and country-specific social norms and values. Based on these insights, and without delving into the specifics of these previous findings, it can be speculated that forms of alienation and autonomy in postgraduate education may exert a similar effect on personal wellbeing as they do in professional environments. However, country-specific material and immaterial frameworks may attribute less to personal wellbeing, depending on the temporality of postgraduate students' stay abroad, which potentially is shorter than those of labour migrants. Consequently, it is anticipated that certain patterns may resonate with the group of international postgraduate students, while others and new patterns can be identified exclusively among the educational cohort.

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