BACKGROUND:
As a key setting, universities shape student wellbeing and academic trajectories. Simultaneously, they are embedded in, and contribute to, existing structural power relations. Students holding marginalised positions report experiences of discrimination more often than others. These experiences adversely affect their mental health, feelings of belonging, and academic engagement. Little is known about how discrimination is experienced at the intersection of multiple inequities in higher education. This study examines how university students in Germany experience discrimination during their studies and how this shapes their wellbeing.

METHODS:
Fifteen semi-structured problem-centred interviews were conducted with university students who self-identified as having experienced discrimination during their studies. Data were analysed using the intersectional multilevel analysis framework by Winker and Degele1, which combines inductive reconstructions of participants’ self-positionings with deductive contextualisation of structural power relations. This approach traces how discrimination operates across interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels.

RESULTS:
Students experienced discrimination as an embodied process shaped by microaggressions, institutional inflexibility, and relational hierarchies, particularly within student–lecturer dynamics. Intersecting forms of othering, including, racism, sexism, xenophobia, classism, language-based exclusion, ableism, caregiving penalties, ageism, and Islamophobia were experienced as overlapping and context-dependent. Participants described how discrimination settled into the body through emotional, cognitive, and physical manifestations expressed as fear, anger, disrupted identities, existential questioning, exhaustion, and burnout. These forms of embodiment were not isolated reactions but ongoing responses. Alongside these harms, students exercised agency through anticipatory navigation, managing visibility, resting, collective engagement, and forms of endurance that reframed survival and solidarity as resistance. Discrimination thus emerged as a dynamic socio-structural process through which academic trajectories and relationships to power were continuously reshaped.

CONCLUSIONS:
Discrimination in higher education functions as a determinant of student mental health. Addressing its embodied consequences requires institutional accountability and policies that move beyond diversity rhetoric toward meaningful structural and cultural transformation.