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. Not 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 privacy line. Stricter here than anywhere else

This is aggregate only. Unlike the weekly mood. Where the staff who support a cohort can open an individual's responses in the cohort browser to reach out. The reason is never shown against a named student, anywhere in the console. There is no drill-down. The student is told exactly that when they answer: "only staff see this, and only ever as a total, never who said what."

The five-student floor applies twice over:

• If fewer than five students have given a reason at all, the whole section is held back. No breakdown.
• 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.

Who can see it

The three staff roles. Institution admin, support responder, and content editor. All reach Insights, and 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

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