The academic year in review · 2025/26
State of the Student Experience 2026
One academic year from the student's side, read from nearly 400,000 student answers: when the year bends, where students struggle, and what can still be done at each stage.
What's inside
- ForewordForewordA letter from our co-founder, Anders Bøegh.
- SummaryExecutive SummaryThe report in two pages: the shape of the year, stage by stage, and what runs through it.
- Part OneThe Start of TermThe first weeks, when groups form and students work out whether they belong.
- Part TwoSettling InThe third month, when deadlines stack up and students can say what is not working.
- Part ThreeFirst Exams and the Winter LowMonths four to six: the first exams and the lowest point of the student year.
- Part FourSpring and Final ExamsMonths seven to eleven: stress before the finals and the exam problems that come back.
- Part FiveThe Year ClosesThe summer, when the year can be read as a whole and next year is planned.
- The LoopListen, Understand, ActThe way of working behind every part, from the first check-in to reporting back.
- MethodBackground and MethodWhere the data comes from and how every number in the report is counted.
Free. Built for quality, wellbeing and leadership teams. Figures are cross-institution aggregates; see the methodology.
A few things students told us this year
The findings are free. Here's a taste of what's inside.
Read from the month each institution's year starts, the year turns in its fourth month and is lowest in the fifth and sixth, just as the first exams arrive.
Points above or below each institution's own average for the year, question by question. M1 is the month the institution's year starts. All institutions, 2025/26.
It recovers in the seventh and holds through the spring, and a survey that runs once a year records one point on that curve. What to do before the low, and what still changes before the finals, is in the report.
The averages look fine. Yet in higher education, one student in four rates at least one part of their experience poor in a single check-in.
About half of those poor ratings come with a reason, written in the same check-in. What students write about at each stage is in the report.
Across all institutions, students rate belonging 8.3 in their class, 7.7 on campus and 7.4 for a network beyond their group.
A single question about belonging gets one number. What the layers show in the first weeks of term is in Part One.
In almost every institution we can follow across two years, the gap between its best and worst month is larger than its change from last year, typically more than twice as large.
With one reading a year, the effect of the month and real change look the same. How the report reads them apart is in the method.