The University Center Model was designed to serve as an option for attainment of baccalaureate and master's degrees by making 4-year institutions accessible through partnerships with a community college. This model has been prevalent on select community college campus for almost 20 years, with little research to substantiate the effectiveness of…

Moreno Valley College, a two-year community college in Southern California, experiences an annual migration of cliff swallows. The presence of these birds inspired the development of the undergraduate research program Flying with Swallows. The assessment of the project indicated significant increases in qualitative student outcomes such as…

Background: Most community college students from low-income families have ambitious educational degree goals, but only a small fraction attains them. For many decades, sociologists have primarily attributed this problem to a cooling out process in which college practitioners diminish students' educational ambitions using academic reorientation…

Since the publication of "Redesigning America's Community Colleges" (Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins) in 2015, guided pathways reform has become a national movement in community colleges. As of spring 2018, more than 250 community colleges have committed to undertaking large-scale guided pathways reforms as part of…

Instructional leadership remains a complicated and debated issue for education. In fact, traditional theories of leadership from within both education and the organizational sciences increasingly face criticism. Drawing from ideas applicable to differentiated contexts of learning, this article develops an alternative model of instructional…

Community college students face a number of life and academic challenges. It is unknown what counseling models are currently employed by community colleges to meet their students' many needs. Representatives of Florida's 28 community colleges completed a survey detailing their counseling model, student populations, rationale behind the model…

Countless media reports point to the mismatch between workers' skills and employers' needs. Education and employment data bear out this fact. Using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and other sources, an influential 2011 report found that a substantial percentage of recent college graduates lack core competencies critical…

The paper uses the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data system (IPEDS) data to simulate the 2020 American Graduation Initiative (AGI) goal introduced by President Obama in the summer of 2009. We estimate community college graduation rates and completion numbers under different scenarios that include the following sets of variables: (a) internal…

Career and technical education (CTE) students pursuing occupational associate's degrees or certificates differ from students seeking academic majors at 2-year institutions in several ways. This article examines several theoretical models of student persistence and offers a conceptual model of student success focused on CTE students in community…

Although most Latina/o transfer students declare intentions to transfer from a community college, few move on to 4-year colleges and universities. The authors provide an overview of the existing information related to transfer objectives and rates. Using the theoretical models of Latina/o critical race theory and validation theory the authors also…

This is the first report from the evaluation of the Community-Based Job Training Grants (CBJTG) being conducted by the Urban Institute, with its partners Johns Hopkins University and Capital Research Corporation. The CBJTG program focuses on building the capacity of community colleges to provide training to workers for high-growth, high-demand…

Discussed a report that considered how well a liaison committee has functioned between the AACJC and the ACCT. (RK)

Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) is an innovative program and strategy developed by the Washington (WA) State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) in conjunction with the state's 29 community colleges and five technical colleges. Its goal is to increase the rate at which adult basic education and…

One of the most vexing problems today involves transforming colleges and universities so that they yield equitable educational outcomes for historically underrepresented students. The traditional approach to achieving equitable educational outcomes has been to focus on increasing the racial diversity of campuses by admitting a higher percentage of…

Distance learning began as an institutional innovation, but as the field matures it faces challenges in finding its place in the community college mainstream. This chapter describes the best practices that helped the Extended Learning Institute at Northern Virginia Community College evolve into a mature distance learning program that is…