SENSE gives colleges an early look at how students experience the critical first weeks of college—when they are beginning classes, navigating college processes and services, establishing goals, and encountering conditions that can support or hinder their progress.
Results help colleges identify where students are gaining momentum, where they may be struggling, and where institutional practices and supports can be strengthened.
Early insight during the survey period
As SENSE is administered, colleges have real-time access to survey responses through interactive dashboards. These early results allow college leaders and campus teams to monitor student experiences as data are collected, examine differences across student groups, and identify issues that may warrant attention while the term is still underway.
Real-time results are unweighted and are designed to support timely conversations and action.
Four focus areas provide an early view of conditions and supports that may affect students' progress.
Barriers and Conditions for Progress
Understand the circumstances that may make it more difficult for students to stay enrolled and make progress, including:
Course availability and scheduling
Access to and receipt of financial assistance
Opportunities to communicate basic-needs concerns
Missed classes, assignments, and access to required course materials
Work, caregiving, and commuting commitments
Financial, transportation, housing, food, technology, health, and other challenges that could lead students to withdraw from classes
Student Services
Explore whether students know about, use, and are satisfied with key student services, including:
Academic advising and counseling
Career counseling
Transfer advising and counseling
Services for active military members and veterans
Services for students with disabilities
Academic Support Services
Examine students' awareness, use, and satisfaction with academic resources designed to help them succeed, including:
Tutoring
Computer labs
Academic coaching
Library services
Essential Services
Understand students' awareness, use, and satisfaction with services that can help address needs outside the classroom, including:
Childcare
Transportation
Mental health services
Health care
Housing assistance Food assistance
Deeper Insight to Plan, Align, and Improve
Following the survey administration, final SENSE results provide a more complete picture of the entering-student experience. Colleges receive weighted results, national context, additional opportunities to disaggregate results and explore relationships among survey items, and access to a student respondent data file.
The final dashboards include the four focus areas available during the survey period and add four more, providing results across eight focus areas in total.
Early Engagement and Momentum
Explore how students experience their transition into college and begin building momentum, including:
Their experience with dual enrollment before college
Whether the college feels welcoming
Connections with faculty, staff, and other students
When students register for classes
Participation in orientation
Enrollment in college success or first-year experience courses
Whether courses connect with students' interests and passions
Advising
Understand how students experience advising and whether they have consistent access to someone who can help them navigate college, including:
Whether students meet with an advisor before registering
Awareness, use, and satisfaction with advising services
Students' primary source of academic advising
Whether a specific person has been assigned to help them
Whether students know when their next advising session should occur
Academic and Career Direction
Examine whether students are developing a clear sense of where they are going and how college connects to their goals, including:
Students' educational goals
Transfer plans and intended majors
Career interests and intended career paths
Academic plans and expected time to completion
Transfer requirements and opportunities
Information about in-demand jobs, earnings, and career skills
Opportunities such as employer shadowing and internships
Teaching and Learning
Explore students' early classroom experiences and the practices that can help establish clear expectations, connection, and support, including:
Students' preferred ways of taking classes How instructors connect students with academic and essential support services
Whether instructors learn students' names and help students connect with one another
Whether expectations for grading and attendance are clear
Whether students receive syllabi and instructor contact information The time students spend preparing for class
Turn Early Insight Into Action
Together, these results help colleges understand both the conditions students bring with them and the experiences the college creates for them.
Colleges can use SENSE results to:
Identify strengths and gaps in the entering-student experience
Examine how experiences differ across student groups
Strengthen onboarding, advising, support services, and classroom practices
Identify barriers that may interfere with student progress
Inform strategic planning, accreditation, and continuous improvement
Track how institutional changes affect the experiences of entering students over time
SENSE helps colleges move from understanding what students experience in their first weeks to identifying where changes in policy, practice, and support can help more students build early momentum and stay on a path toward their goals.
