About SENSE

Students’ earliest weeks in college are decisive. SENSE provides real-time insight into how entering students experience onboarding, advising, course access, and early academic expectations—alongside early indicators related to basic needs, financial pressures, mental health, and competing responsibilities. These early results help colleges identify where students are connecting, where processes are breaking down, and which conditions may put persistence at risk—so leaders can coordinate supports and take action while there is still time to make a difference.

Today’s community and technical colleges face unprecedented challenges. Institutions nationwide are navigating a growing mismatch: they are expected to serve more students—many of whom arrive underprepared for college-level work—while operating with diminishing financial support. At the same time, increasing numbers of students contend with basic needs insecurity, including food and housing instability, as well as rising mental health challenges that may affect their ability to persist and succeed. The impact of these pressures is evident in student outcomes. Nationally, roughly 25% of entering community college students do not persist to their first spring term, and nearly 40% fail to return for their second fall.*

* National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (June 2025). Persistence and Retention: Fall 2023 Beginning Postsecondary Student Cohort. Retrieved from https://nscresearchcenter.org/persistence-retention/ [See Figure 1.3a]

In 2025, CCCSE completed a comprehensive update of SENSE, strengthening its role as a front-door diagnostic tool for understanding how students experience the institution at the point of entry. The revised survey expands its focus to include basic needs security, learning modality preferences, and more robust insight into students’ access to academic, essential, and student support services.

SENSE captures students’ experiences from the time they decide to attend through the first three weeks of the academic term, providing a holistic, actionable view of the early student experience—one that reflects both the complexity of students’ lives and how institutional structures are encountered at the front door.

SENSE helps colleges act early—before barriers to persistence take hold.

By focusing on the critical transition into college, the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE) provides timely, actionable insight into what entering students experience and how institutional practices support—or hinder—their ability to remain enrolled and succeed. SENSE complements the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) by narrowing the lens to the entering student experience and delivering insight earlier in the academic cycle—supporting leadership decisions that shape student success from the start.

Colleges use SENSE data to:

• Understand early conditions for success
  Examine onboarding, advising, engagement, career and transfer exploration, basic needs, mental health, and early academic behaviors.
   
• Identify barriers and gaps
  Disaggregate results to surface structural, financial, academic, and non-academic barriers—including gaps in access to advising, supports, and career and transfer guidance—that affect early persistence.
   
• Coordinate action and monitor progress
  Align advising, instruction, student services, and leadership around shared data to strengthen onboarding, supports, and early pathway clarity, and to track the impact of changes over time.

SENSE is a product and service of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, which is part of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin.