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Sentiment analysis of students’ feedback using machine learning algorithms has emerged as a valuable tool for understanding students’ sentiments and improving educational outcomes. Currently, existing systems use frequency-based methods for feature selection (e.g., Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and Bag of Words (BoW)) not to capture the subtleties of emotions expressed in student feedback and do not provide insights into the specific concerns of students via topics or themes. In this study, we propose the Student Sentiment from Feedback (SSF) framework, which includes four main procedures: pre-processing, feature selection, classification, and theme finding. The SSF framework classifies student sentiments and subsequently groups feedback into themes using semantic networks based on word co-occurrence. Our innovative feature selection approach combines TF-IDF with sentiment-based features derived from SentiWordNet and intensifiers, creating a robust feature vector that enhances the dataset’s richness and improves classification accuracy and robustness. In the experiments, we utilize a public dataset from Kaggle, applying our proposed method and various machine learning models (e.g., k-nearest neighbor, decision tree, random forest, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine, gradient boosting, and extreme gradient boosting). The experimental results show that our concatenated features achieve the highest accuracy across all machine learning models (greater than 0.82). Our study demonstrates the efficacy of this hybrid feature selection method, contributing to better understanding and decision-making in educational settings.