For 41 years, Dr. Karen A. Stout, recipient of the 2025 Diverse Champions Award, has focused her career on helping community colleges achieve outstanding student success.
“Dr. Stout is a thought leader,” says Dr. Steady H. Moono, president of SUNY Schenectady County Community College. “In my decades of community college life, she is the most brilliant, the most visionary, the most forward-thinking person I’ve ever met.”
Since 2015, Stout has served as president and CEO of Achieving the Dream (ATD), a network of over 300 community colleges, with the goal of being accessible hubs of learning, credentialing and economic mobility that eliminate inequities in educational and workforce outcomes. Utilizing a data-driven approach, ATD provides coaching that facilitates institutional transformation so that these colleges can have maximum impact on the lives of their students and on the communities within which they are located.
“She’s known for her transformational work in higher education,” says Dr. Theresa B. Felder, president of Harford Community College in Maryland, where Stout began her community college career in 1984. “She’s helping colleges implement evidence-based reforms.”
Early inspiration
In her first community college position, much of Stout’s work focused on access and reaching as many stakeholders as possible. Part of her job at Harford involved conducting presentations at local high schools. The questions the students asked, she says, helped her to understand the power of community colleges. She began to study community colleges and understand that they’re different depending on local context, state system and other factors.
As her work progressed, Stout recognized the potential these colleges had in their surrounding communities. She saw that certain processes and procedures, such as schedules and transcript evaluations, could be unique and not simply replications from four-year institutions. As technology developed, she embraced it.
“My data mindset was shaped very early in my leadership career,” Stout says in an interview with Diverse.
