Student’s Quality of Life at the University: a Qualitative Study

Since the end of the XX century the university has enlarged its traditional role focused on the production and reproduction of scientific knowledge, thus becoming a social institution, an academic reference for those whose lives are developed within its walls (Tonon 2012b, p. 4). For more than a decade, we have worked in this thematic field, and the development of three former research projects (2005–2013) has allowed us to identify a direct and positive relationship between the person’s access to university studies and their quality of life. This has reinforced the idea that access to the university is a strategy which improves people’s quality of life, generating an enhancement of their sense of well-being (Tonon 2005). The pilot study we are about to put forward has been conducted during the years 2018 and 2019, with students of different courses of study in the Faculty of Social Sciences of Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora, Argentina, with the object of examining their opinion regarding their quality of life at the university. It is a pilot study which provides the university authorities with a situational analysis for the construction of an institutional agenda of higher education. Furthermore, it is the first step toward generating the construction process of a new indicator development on the study of quality of university life. The abovementioned research study was conducted by the qualitative method, and carried out on the basis of a sample of 200 university students between the ages of 18 and 20.