One-quarter of community college freshmen do not return for a second semester. By the second year, half of them are gone. “The future of our country rests on having students educated beyond high school,” says Kaye McClenney, director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) at The University of Texas at Austin. “So that is not an acceptable situation.” With Houston Endowment’s support, the CCCSE was able to include Texas’s small community colleges in a national survey about students’ educational experiences. The survey provides administrators with “actionable information” they can use to improve programs and services that “help students reach their goals.” Through that survey, McClenney says, “We discovered that many students, especially high-risk students, are lost during their first semester. Understanding that, we rushed back to meet students at the front door of the community college with the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE). Our goal is to help improve their persistence toward a college degree. The data shows that the more engaged, connected and involved students are, the more likely they are to succeed in college.”

SENSE has been administered to students during the fourth and fifth weeks of their first term at 199 community colleges throughout the nation. The survey asks students about their experiences with admissions, orientation and their first three weeks of class. “We’re finding, for example, that too many students don’t know about helpful services, and that they don’t go to orientation programs if they’re optional rather than required,” says McClenney.

The CCCSE helps colleges use the data they gather to understand and improve students’ experiences. “We’re seeing some interesting things happen as a result of the survey,” says McClenney. “Lone Star Colleges–North Harris, using this data, designed a very intensive and intrusive advisory program for their most at-risk students. The preliminary data shows a 97 percent persistence rate for participating students.” The Houston Community College System through the ‘Achieving the Dream’ initiative and using its SENSE results piloted a course that taught incoming students how to study, how to prepare for exams, how to take notes and how to manage time. It also matched them with academic advisors. “The data was so convincing in terms of improving student persistence from the first to second term that the Houston Community College System has now scaled that program up to all campuses,” says McClenney. “The System is seeing annual increases in retention rates from term to term.” She adds, “We provide colleges with data so they can create the experiences that allow students to be successful.”

CRSS annually trains new school board members from Texas’s 57 largest school districts, which enroll more than half of the state’s schoolchildren. Combined, the districts spend approximately $15 billion to operate each year. McAdams says, “CRSS gets board members to think of themselves as reform leaders who can enact policies and who can hire superintendents committed to eliminating the achievement gap and to promoting high achievement for all students. We instill the belief that they can do something about this pressing issue and then we teach them what they can actually do.”