Pathways to Wellbeing: Differentiated Associations Across Three Forms of Campus Engagement in a Diverse UAE University Context

University students in diverse higher education contexts face concurrent risks: flourishing often below optimal levels alongside elevated depression and anxiety, though these are often addressed through generic, undifferentiated wellbeing provision. In diverse settings such as United Arab Emirates (UAE) universities, where international students constitute the majority of many student bodies, how campus activities relate to social belonging is both a wellbeing question and an equity issue. This study examined how extracurricular participation, sport (a subset of extracurricular participation), and exercise were associated with student wellbeing among 801 students across two UAE institutions. Extracurricular participation was associated with social belonging, which showed significant indirect associations with flourishing, depression, and anxiety, consistent across covariate adjustment and robustness checks. Exercise showed a similarly consistent direct association with flourishing; it was also associated with lower depression and anxiety in the primary model, though these associations were less robust than the flourishing finding and did not hold under further sensitivity checks. Sport showed a small association with stress mindset and anxiety, though this relies on a measure with low reliability and should be treated as tentative. Loneliness was not significantly associated with any engagement form. These findings point to a differentiated picture of campus engagement, in which extracurricular participation and exercise show the clearest links to wellbeing, while sport’s association with stress appraisal requires further evidence.