Rio Salado is a nontraditional community college that is highly integrated in the global economy. This chapter describes the Rio Salado College systems approach, which relies almost exclusively on adjunct faculty to accomplish its mission, vision, and purposes.

Changing an institution's culture so that everyone at the college is focused wholeheartedly on learning is neither easy nor insignificant, and it cannot occur overnight. For some colleges, it means introducing a whole new way of life. The evolution to an institutional environment that both supports student learning and measures learning outcomes…

The Community College Survey of Student Engagement, established in 2001 and administered by the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin, provides systematically collected data on the experiences of community college students. This article describes what has been learned through the survey to date and notes plans…