The paper addresses the following controversial issues between colleges and their external stakeholders: defining and measuring student success, developmental education, and accountability. Given a variety of educational goals by individual learners, community colleges need to create a system of multiple measures to define student success. An important new way of measuring student performance is student goal attainment. Furthermore, a redefinition of "completion" would permit colleges to track incremental learning or skill acquisition by acknowledging the completion of "chunks" or modules within programs. The purpose of developmental education is to provide all students with the skills necessary to succeed, regardless of their diverse needs and goals. An expanded yet clearly defined role for developmental education can help make the promise of open access to higher education a reality and strengthen the U.S. workforce of tomorrow. A simple set of reliable and valid indicators centered around student goal attainment needs to be adopted nationally if community colleges are to respond more meaningfully to increasing public expectations to account for their performance. The AACC (American Association of Community Colleges) Core Indicators (1999) provide a valuable resource and could be adopted as a starting point for building local college accountability plans. (JA)