What's weighing on students
Pulse tells you how many students are wobbling. This tells you why. When a student checks in as wobbling, First Six asks a gentle follow-up, "What's weighing on you most right now?", and the answers roll up into a cohort picture that finally puts a reason behind the number.
It is the signal institutions have always wanted and rarely had: not a national statistic about why students leave, but your cohort saying, in the moment, what is making these weeks hard.
Where it comes from
The reason is captured on the student side, not asked of you. After a student picks the "wobbling" face on their weekly check-in, they see one optional, skippable prompt: "What's weighing on you most right now?" They can pick one of six things or skip it entirely. It only appears after a wobbling check-in, at most once a week, and it is framed as support, a nudge toward the right help rather than an exit survey.
The six categories come from the retention research (Tinto and Bean, and Australian first-year-experience work), which keeps recurring on the same handful of drivers. On the dashboard they read:
- Fitting in / belonging: finding their people, feeling like they belong here.
- Keeping up academically: the workload, the pace, staying on top of it.
- Money / affordability: the cost of being here.
- Course not as expected: the gap between the brochure and the reality.
- Wellbeing / how they feel: how they are in themselves.
- Something else: everything that doesn't fit the five above.
Reading the breakdown
In Insights → Pulse, the What's weighing on students section shows the cohort total as a set of bars: each reason with its count and share, largest first. It answers "of the students telling us they're wobbling, what's driving it?" for this cohort, this intake.
Read it the way you read Pulse: as a shape, not a verdict. One or two students naming money is not a fees crisis; a reason that climbs week on week, or one that dominates the whole arc, is worth a response: a briefing, a targeted resource, a conversation with the team that owns that lever.
The reason only makes sense next to the sentiment. A cohort that is mostly settled with a small "belonging" signal is a very different picture from one that is broadly wobbling with the same signal. Read how many are struggling (Pulse) and what's weighing on them (this) together.
The privacy line: stricter here than anywhere else
This report is aggregate only. There is no drill-down from these numbers to a name: nothing you click here opens an individual.
A student's own reason is visible in one place, and only one: their profile in the cohort browser, alongside the check-in it belongs to. That is a permission-gated, scope-narrowed surface that records every open in the audit log, and the student is told at the moment they answer that their support team can see it so they can offer the right kind of help. Use it to reach a student well, not to browse. (Changed 2026-07-25; see R120 in the risk register.)
The five-student floor applies twice over:
- If fewer than five students have given a reason at all, the whole section is held back, with no breakdown shown.
- Any single reason named by one to four students is folded into a grouped "a further N students named reasons that were each too few to show separately" line, never named on its own.
That suppression is enforced in the database, not just the display, so a reason
bucket can't be read back to an individual even in an export. It is the same
MIN_N = 5 wall that protects Pulse, applied to a more sensitive signal.
This describes what students said was weighing on them during a voluntary check-in. First Six does not see enrolment, grades, or withdrawals, so it cannot tell you who left or why they left. Treat a rising reason as a prompt to act early, while acting is still cheap, not as a measured cause of attrition.
Who can see it
Institution admins and support responders reach Insights, along with any custom role granted the view-insights permission. Content editors don't. The data is scoped to your own institution and cohort. It is a tenant view, not a personal one: there is nothing here that identifies a student, so there is nothing to gate more tightly than the cohort itself.
Common questions
Is this an exit survey? It feels grim to ask why students might leave.
No, and it's deliberately not framed that way to students. They see a supportive "what's weighing on you most right now?" after a hard week, with a path to help, never "why are you leaving". It draws on the same evidence base as the exit literature with a much kinder frame.
Can I see which student named a particular reason?
Not from this report, which stays a cohort total with no drill-down. You can see it on a student's own profile in the cohort browser, next to the check-in it came from, and every open of a profile is recorded in the audit log. Students are told this when they answer, because a student who tells you money is the problem is asking for help, not filling in a statistic.
Why is the whole section blank?
Fewer than five students in this slice have given a reason yet. The breakdown appears once at least five sit behind it, so no total can be traced to one person. It fills in as the cohort checks in.
How does this differ from the shape of the six weeks?
This is the cohort total: the whole arc in one breakdown. The shape of the six weeks takes the same reasons and lays them out week by week, so you can see when each concern peaks.
Related
The fastest answer is usually one question away.