Well-Being and Happiness among University Students: A Case Study of Ethnic Diversity in the New Multicultural Netherlands

For years, the Netherlands has ranked high on happiness indexes, both for children and adults. Part of the explanation for the well-being of Dutch children lies in the importance of school belonging and its linkage to high life satisfaction. However, little research has been done in the Netherlands on students and their sense of belonging at the university. This chapter explores how students in one of the most ethnically diverse universities in the Netherlands experience the university’s social climate, and in turn, how it interacts with students’ well-being, their sense of belonging, and feelings of exclusion. The findings show that the potential for intercultural happiness is not yet realized, as inequalities within the education system exclude students who are ethnically diverse. Moreover, the chapter emphasizes the importance of directing attention to the personal characteristics of students since to identify what well-being means, there is a need to employ multiple and different lenses. Well-being should be looked at through the gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, disability, or first-generation lens. And even if all these characteristics influence students’ well-being (either positively or negatively) to a similar extent, the reasons behind well-being (or lack thereof) can be highly different.