Progress Over Time

Married scholars, Dr. Byron McClenney and Dr. Kay McClenney, have contributed significantly to the CCLP at UT-Austin. This past decade the couple helped expand the Texas-based program by launching a leading national community college student survey project and helping establish the Achieving the Dream project as one of the national partners.

Founded in 2001, the community college student engagement survey has included the experiences of nearly a million community college students in 49 states at 800 different community colleges.

“All of that work is to help colleges to use data to understand student experiences better and therefore to better understand where they, the colleges, are performing well,” says Kay McClenney, who is the Community College Survey of Student Engagement director at the CCLP.

Achieving the Dream, one of the largest community college student success programs in the United States, brings to the fore best practices in developmental education courses such that they can motivate students to persist in their schooling rather than allow them to grow frustrated.

Since its launch in 2005, 82 institutions in 15 states have joined the Achieving the Dream program. While individual schools, such as Achieving the Dream participants, are reporting progress in student persistence, it will likely take years before such progress can be translated into significant improvements in national community college graduation and transfer numbers, Kay McClenney cautions.

“The bottom line is that we know enough; we know enough now to make a serious difference in the percentage of our students who are successful, and we need to be doing more of what we know,” she says.