Life success in the representation of students of a technical university in conditions of digitalization and the COVID-19 pandemic

The problem of life success has been at the center of social science, especially sociology, for many years. The aim of the article is to perform a sociological analysis of university students’ ideas about life success in conditions of modern society. Students of a technical university formed the object of analysis. The subject of the study is their ideas about life success in the context of digitalization and the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis is conducted simultaneously at two levels: theoretical and empirical. The comparison of the empirical data of 2022 with similar indicators of achieving life success, taken from our survey of the 1980-1990s, yields the following results. Respondents of 2022 survey have a novel model of a successful life path, which largely depends on personal capital - a set of individual-personal and social resources. This group is a product of the digital society of millennials. Despite the differences between the respondents of both groups by the indicators under consideration, cultural and moral continuity between them remains. The main group of respondents (2022) focuses on achieving their life success in the territories where they received education, where their relatives and friends live, where a demand exists for their skills and abilities along with opportunities to achieve their life success. In recent years, migration orientation among students has somewhat decreased.