What 1,300+ Students Told Us in the First Weeks of Fall About Student Wellness Needs
New Insights About Student Wellness Needs
& A New Dashboard
The first month of the semester is full of transitions, especially for first-year students. They're adjusting to new surroundings, routines, relationships, and expectations all at once. As they learn the ins and outs of academic and campus life, how they feel about their wellbeing in these first weeks can shape their whole year.
That's why many of our partner campuses build WellSort into their new student programs, whether as a pre-arrival requirement, part of orientation, or an activity in first-year seminar courses. Reaching students at these moments helps them to clarify and understand what they need most and connect them with support before small concerns grow into bigger ones. For campuses, this also provides an opportunity to assess how their programs meet students' needs in these moments.
This fall, those programs are running on our updated WellSort platform, now live across partner campuses. Since the start of the semester, over 1,300 students have completed a digital card sort. Read on for an early look at what they are sharing.
WellSort Data Dashboard Updates
Along with our updated platform, we've refreshed our data dashboard to give campuses a clearer, more complete picture of student wellbeing. The dashboard is now organized into four views: Session Analytics, Wellbeing Analytics, Dimension Analytics, and Resource Analytics.
Wellbeing Analytics shows exactly how your students sort the cards: their top focus priority, their top three cards, and how every card falls across "want or want more of," "have or have enough of," and "not a priority for me." Across all views, campuses can filter results to look at specific student groups, compare priorities over time, and export data for reports and presentations.
Partner campuses can log in anytime to see what their own students are sharing and use those insights to shape programming, outreach, and resource planning in real time.
Wellbeing One Month In: What's rising to the top
Reflecting on data from student wellness needs across our partner campuses, one priority has stood out this first month: Quality Sleep.
This data makes sense. Students are managing new routines, navigating different stressors, and for those who live on campus, sharing spaces with others. Sleep affects nearly every part of the student experience. It supports memory, focus, and academic performance, and it's closely tied to mood, stress, and how well students fight off the colds and illnesses that spread quickly through classrooms and residence halls this time of year.
Many campuses already offer sleep hygiene education. For those looking to build on that work, a whole-campus approach to sleep could be a natural next step. Here are a few ideas for supporting first-year students:
Rethink assignment deadlines. Encourage faculty, especially those who teach first year courses, to move deadlines from 11:59 p.m. to earlier in the evening or the next morning. Midnight deadlines quietly train students to work late, and it's an easy structural change that doesn't rely on student willpower.
Build sleep into roommate agreements. Many campuses already use roommate agreements, but sleep schedules, lights-out times, and guest policies often get glossed over. Prompting those conversations in week one can prevent conflicts that cost students sleep all semester.
Look at the welcome week calendar. Late-night programming is designed to give students alternatives to partying, but a packed schedule of late events can set a pattern of short sleep from day one. Offering some earlier-ending options sends a different message.
Equip RAs and peer educators for brief conversations. A short, check-in about sleep can be more effective than a flyer, and it gives students who flagged sleep an additional point of connection.
WellSort supports this work, too. One of the things we're most proud of in our updated platform is how it connects students directly to campus resources that match their top priority. Whatever rises to the top, students leave the activity knowing where to find support on their campus.
Looking ahead. We know that priorities will shift as the semester unfolds. As more students engage with WellSort, we'll be sharing broader trends across demographics and over time, and you can explore the same questions with your own campus data anytime in the dashboard.
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