Recent research and studies show increasing dissatisfaction among children and young adults,
including primary and secondary school students. This increasing development of
dissatisfaction grows in parallel with the development of the competition-oriented state and the
performance-oriented society, which presumably shares a connection. A less highlighted aspect
of the increasing dissatisfaction in Denmark is the well-being of university students. The
purpose of this master’s thesis is to shed light on which factors play a role in relation to well-
being or dissatisfaction among university students. By diverting attention towards what plays
a role for the student’s well-being as well as dissatisfaction, the intent is twofold, in that the
goal is to understand the situation of university student’s experiences. Through these, we will
gain a better understanding of students that have experienced dissatisfaction, or dropped out of
university, contributing to the pool of research within social work. We will approach the field
with a critical hermeneutic approach, with the ideal of resonance as the normative ideal.
Whereas much of the existing research on the increasing dissatisfaction, especially among
university students, is based on quantitative studies, this study's empirical basis will be 10 semi-
structured qualitative interviews among university students. The thesis’ analysis is primarily
based on the collected empirical data but will also include other existing empirical data deemed
relevant to the study's content. The analysis is divided into three parts, the first focuses on social
acceleration and how this affects the well-being of students. The second part focuses on the
students' forms of capital and habitus, and how these affect the students’ educational
opportunities, including their well-being. Whereas the last part focuses on how university
students experience the conditions for achieving resonance at their universities. The results
show that the students experience various challenges, stemming from the social accelerations
effect on their time, and lack hereof, which can lead to feelings of being pressured, as a result
of this. The experiences of being pressured seem to be variably mitigated, depending on the
students' forms of capital and their habitus, the result of which seems to play a significant role
for the students' experiences of well-being. The students' forms of capital and habitus seem to
have an inextricable connection to their experience of resonance at the universities, as well as
how they handle and connect to the overall framework and learning environment at the
universities.