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MIT's AI committee says what AI is doing to the social side of learning, from office hours and study groups to how students work with teaching assistants, is an even deeper challenge than AI-proofing assessment. Australia's response since 2023 has centred on assessing and assuring learning. We argue the habit MIT worries about is decided earlier, when a first-year student is stuck and deciding who to ask.

Every equity group ACSES tracks kept more first-year students in 2024. A gap of 13 percentage points between the best and worst-retained groups says more than the average that made the headlines.

International undergraduate attrition rose from 9.7 per cent in 2018 to 17.4 per cent in 2023, feeding a Senate inquiry and a visa crackdown. Domestic bachelor attrition fell by almost as many points in a single year, 2022 to 2023, and reached nobody.

Undergraduate ratings of student support and services are stuck at their lowest since 2015. Postgraduate ratings, in the same survey, are at a record high. Peer engagement recovered for both cohorts, so the support gap is not a general mood, and it is not evenly spread across who needs it most.

Since January, Australian universities have been paid a fixed, two-year-lagged rate for every low-SES, First Nations and regional student they enrol. The rates are public. What the money is meant to achieve in retention terms, and whether anyone is checking, is not.

Domestic commencing bachelor attrition dropped from 14.7 per cent to 12.2 per cent in a single cohort, the lowest in at least a decade. The explanations on offer are stories about who enrolled, not about better first years, and the difference decides what a transition team should do next February.

A portal waits to be visited. First-year engagement needs something that comes to the student.

Most student surveys go unanswered for predictable reasons. A check-in that gets a response looks very different.

Census is treated as an administrative deadline. For retention, it is the single most important date in the first six weeks.

A short, practical checklist for carrying the energy of orientation into the weeks that actually decide whether students stay.

You can understand how a cohort is doing without watching individual students. That difference is the whole point.

The window where most first-year attrition is decided is smaller, and earlier, than most retention strategies assume.