About the data

How we measure

Every figure on this site comes from real student check-ins on the StudentPulse platform. The same data informs three institutional missions: quality and learning, student wellbeing, and senior leadership. This page explains the dataset, the scoring, and how we protect student anonymity.

The dataset

This data draws on three million student datapoints, collected continuously since 2020 across higher-education institutions, primarily in Europe. A datapoint is any individual student input: a scored answer or a written response to a short check-in.

Unlike one-off annual surveys, this data is gathered through short check-ins at key moments in the student journey, all year round. That makes the picture continuous rather than a yearly snapshot.

One scale, one framework. The headline Index and the topic and domain figures all come from the same scored check-in responses, on a 0-10 scale. Every question, old or new, is mapped to the StudentPulse 2026 framework of three domains and 38 topics, so scores are comparable across institutions that ask different questions. A second layer of written comments adds the student voice behind the numbers.

Whose data this is. The dataset comes from higher-education institutions that use StudentPulse, primarily in Europe. It is large and continuous, but self-selected: institutions that adopt a student-feedback platform are not a random sample of the sector. Read cross-institution figures as indicative of engaged institutions, not a census, and topic spreads as the range among institutions with enough responses to report.

Scoring

Answers are reported on a 0 to 10 scale, where higher means better. A score of 5.4 on academic stress means students, on average, find the stress of studying difficult to manage. A score of 8.8 on teacher approachability means students strongly agree their teachers are easy to reach.

The Framework

Every answer is organised by the StudentPulse Framework: three domains, 38 topics, and 155 subtopics. This lets us compare like with like, and trace a single theme such as belonging or workload across the whole dataset.

Anonymity and ethics

• All figures are cross-institution aggregates. No single institution is identified.
• A minimum group size is applied to every published figure, so no individual or small group can be singled out.
• Quotes are de-identified and screened before publication. Nothing identifying a student or institution is published.
• Wellbeing themes are reported with care, without alarm and without blaming students or staff.

What this is not

These are patterns across many institutions, not a verdict on any one of them. Institutions using StudentPulse see their own live data inside the platform. This site shares what the wider dataset reveals about the student experience.