**Abstract**

How happiness is defined depends on who is asked. In the case of universities, student happiness should prevail, yet their voices are often overlooked. This is also the case in the research literature where non-Western views are less frequently reflected. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), a country whose population is comprised of nearly 90% expatriate residents, is a good study case as campuses are filled with international students and the wellbeing of residents is a national priority. Responses from 80 UAE-based expatriate students reveal they are happiest with friends and in social activities and interactions; they want more opportunities to connect socially in classrooms and campuses, efforts which can be crafted by faculty. They also want joyful, inspiring learning where they can discuss and be exposed to other views, with many driven by the need to feel productive, efficacious and engaged. Solutions included the need for faculty to develop warmer student relationships, the maintenance of online learning to reflect realities of work and relationships, and for students to be treated with more respect as fee-paying adults. As the number of international students rise, research into their happiness and what universities can do to increase it remains a global priority.

**Keywords:** happiness, university, institutions, students, qualitative, belonging, social connections

### **1. Introduction**

University is a time of transition; greater independence and less oversight mark the social, learning, and emotional worlds of young adults. With freedom to make life choices, have fun, and choose one's friends, there is also more isolation and stress, financial worry, and learning struggles [1–3]. Early adulthood's slope is slippery; many young people thrive, but some flounder, and others even suffer. Indeed, mental health is taxed upon university entrance with depression, anxiety, and stress peaking around the age of 25 [4–6]. In the Middle East/North Africa region, depression and

anxiety in young people are higher than global averages [7, 8] and the prevalence of mental health issues is growing with implications for learning, quality of life, relationships and future work outcomes.

Yet, greater than the mere absence of illbeing, the presence of wellbeing is also conducive to a good life. Young people who experience greater life satisfaction and more frequent experiences of positive emotion are more likely to attain a postsecondary degree, search for work, be hired and promoted, as well as get a higher salary [9–11]. Studies conducted in schools and universities show that greater wellbeing boosts learning by as much as 6 months of additional learning and reduces the chances of poor performance [12–15]. Greater wellbeing also spells fewer mental health issues such as depression, loneliness, and anxiety into adulthood [16, 17]. More than simply "nice to have", wellbeing is protective as well as promotive of good living, social relating and learning.

Still, wellbeing is often positioned as the responsibility of counseling departments alone and often takes the form of consumable skills and awareness raising initiatives [1, 3, 18]. By construing the psychosocial needs of students as individual mental health issues, institutions avoid the responsibility of building positive ecosystems. Yet, with local stigma around help-seeking and poorly resourced mental health services [19, 20], alongside post-COVID learning losses and weak performance on university exams more generally [21, 22], and ongoing future economic and employment uncertainty, learning institutions must and can do more [2, 3, 23–25]. Further, as many countries are now focused on wellbeing as a national priority, as is the case in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where this study is situated, educational institutions have additional incentive to meet this national aim, although universities have been slow to adopt the view that wellbeing matters. Knowing what students perceive as helpful is necessary. Comprised of nearly 90% expatriates, the UAE is a hub for university students. Soliciting their views can help pave the way towards developing more responsive institutions.

### **1.1 "Positive universities": more than learning and profit**

Positive universities [26] have recently been identified in the field of positive psychology as institutional ecosystems that are expressly designed to nurture and facilitate student wellbeing. Positive universities explicitly prioritize wellbeing as much as academic performance. To drive wellbeing agendas, they have at their disposal a range of drivers including potential curriculum adjustments, special for-credit wellbeing courses, campus initiatives, architectural design specifications, wellbeing policies aimed at student, administrative, learning and management processes, as well as aims to strengthen interpersonal relationships. Topics such as fairness, inclusion and integrity, as much as joy, curiosity, depression and loneliness are routinely discussed. This focus is primarily aimed at students, but the wellbeing of faculty, employees, as well as leadership and management is also maximized. Wellbeing is construed as a business imperative given its links to organizational productivity, turnover, profit, and customer loyalty [27–29]. It is equally a learning instrument and student retention tool given that it is tied to employability, university drop-out rates, academic learning and future work satisfaction [30, 31]. Positive institutions are preventive as much as proactive in nature, predicting what students, faculty, management, employers, and community stakeholders need to emotionally thrive. Parents, alumni, and institutional partners are also actively involved. Positive universities deliver students ready for work and more importantly, prepared to contribute to society and maximize their own potential.

### *Thanks for Asking! How UAE-Based University Students Conceptualize Happiness and How… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107363*

Yet, the reality is that being a university student is often marked by loneliness, lack of meaning, and low or negative moods [1–3]. For students in international forms of education, there is often a disconnect between student's prior education systems and that which is being offered, such that independent critical thinking, student-led motivation, academic writing, defending one's ideas, and group-based learning conflicts with memorization and rote learning [32–34]. English language proficiency not only affects learning, but socialization and the ability and willingness to ask for assistance [32, 34, 35]. That nearly all faculty are also expatriates and have their own culturally embedded notions of learning and relating is another adjustment students make [34].

Further, the wellbeing of young people has often been overlooked as institutions do not consider it their concern [36]. In the UAE, young people are often "Third Culture Kids"; that is, not a product of their parent's home country (i.e., in some cases parents come from two separate countries, in which the young person has spent no time), and not belonging to the UAE national culture either, making needs for attachment and belonging salient. Further, after completing secondary school, they transition to higher education while continuing to live under their parent's roof and are often more motivated to spend time on campus in a bid for independence [37]. Their continued parental living arrangements and expatriate status has paradoxically meant institutions construe wellbeing as a private family and not an institutional concern.

Moreover, in the Arabian Gulf emerging economies, the focus of private institutions as new operating campuses is to prosper in competitive institutional markets, climb international rankings and generate profit for local investors or home campuses [34, 38–40]. Efforts to stem costs have meant that community service, professional development, wellbeing and mental health commitments are not priorities. With the number of international students rising and the internationalization of higher education growing globally, including in the Gulf [34, 38, 39], institutions have an interest in developing themselves to meet the demand alongside the psychosocial and academic needs of those who attend them.

### **1.2 The case for asking what matters**

Despite growing interest in wellbeing, there is little consensus around what it means [41–43], especially at university [3]. It is often used interchangeably with the umbrella term of "happiness," referring more generally to an affective state of feeling good, while "wellbeing" refers to, and also includes functioning well over time. Further, while research to guide initiatives grows, what is relied upon more often stems from the West (e.g., [1]) and is based on "WEIRD" samples, i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic [44] that is not always helpful elsewhere. Further, the most recent iteration of positive psychology 3.0 construes wellbeing from a systems perspective, whereby contexts are the unit of intervention and understanding, versus individuals alone [41, 45]. This removes the onus on individuals to singularly engage with their wellbeing, instead sharing that responsibility with the systems in which they operate.

There is also a growing importance of the need to include participant voices, often via a qualitative lens to produce insights that are not available through standardized means, but also to understand how wellbeing is lived [46, 47]. The lay conceptions that individuals hold, that is, their personal beliefs about the nature of their own happiness, its values, antecedents, as well as outcomes, highlight what matters to them and reflect their values and experiences [48–50]. Listening to the views of young people as consumers of education and wellbeing can help institutions guide actions, policies, and initiatives accordingly [2, 51].

Indeed, research involving young people often reveals a disconnect between the approaches they deem important versus those put forward by institutions [52]. For example, in school, young people identified the need for informal, immersive ways to foster social connectedness and support, over individual skills-based tools and strategies [18, 52]. Similar results have been found in a group of Chinese university students studying in Australia who identified wellbeing offerings they felt would help them best, including cross-cultural interactions, non-discriminatory campus environments and greater support with employment and housing opportunities [48]. These were in great contrast with what was being offered on campus, such as stress-management services and individual counseling. Considering students as both consumers and coproducers of interventions [53] alongside other institutional and community changes can give them voice, a wellbeing intervention itself, and remove the burden from either group solving wellbeing challenges alone.

In sum, higher education has a role in strengthening student wellbeing [1–3, 23, 48]; yet individual-level interventions designed to "fix" students rather than identifying the institutional drivers that fuel problems are often preferred. Inquiry into the broader systemic factors to support the wellbeing of young people is growing as institutional transformations, like physical space, part-time study options, faculty training in wellbeing, and policies around mental health, diversity and inclusion for example, may have larger impacts than individual intervention [1, 3, 54]. Thus, what institutions can and should do is growing as a topic of scientific inquiry, as well as a business imperative. Accordingly, we explore these views.
