The Framework › Social
Peer Support & Collaboration
Distribution of responses
How institutions vary
Middle 80% of the 10 institutions with enough responses. Social domain mean: 8.0.
Institution is a major factor here: weaker and stronger institutions are 2.3 points apart on this topic. Where a student studies shapes their experience more than the topic itself does.
What we ask
“I feel supported by my classmates.”
What students say, and why
Mixed-language grouping and perfectionism strain collaboration.
"Teachers put us in groups with others who don’t speak Danish, and I’m not a Danish teacher."
A help culture the institution sets up: helping each other is simply how the class works.
"The school’s focus on the social side created a shared understanding that no one gets through this programme without help from each other."
"Even if they do not understand it either, we reach an understanding by talking it through together."
Representative, de-identified comments from the lowest- and highest-scoring responses, translated where needed.
Related insights
Students' most reliable source of help is each other
Peer-to-peer help scores 8.4 out of 10, higher than any formal peer-support structure built around it.
Four factorsEveryday academic collaboration, not the fixed study group, is the lever
EVA's research finds that students who collaborate academically drop out less, score higher and report better wellbeing. The distinctive finding: general collaboration across the programme matters more than any single study group, and institutions set the conditions for it.
Four factorsBelonging is the factor most tied to wellbeing, and it is won early
EVA names belonging the factor most important for student wellbeing, and finds it is formed most in the transition into study life. That makes it measurable and actionable from the first weeks, not something to fix once a student is already drifting.
How we measure it
This is the topic-level average across its subtopics, on a 0-10 scale (higher is better), so an individual subtopic can score higher or lower than the topic shown here. Figures are scored responses from the last 12 months, mapped to the 2026 framework via the canonical question mapping. Movement compares the most recent six months with the prior six. Distribution bands: 0-4, >4-<8, 8-10. Cross-institution aggregate; no single institution identified; minimum group size applied.
Read the State of the Student Experience 2026
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