In the United States, where social mobility has been considered a birthright, community colleges are essential to that promise. But America's 1,000 community colleges, which educate 9 million students, are routinely under-resourced and often fall short of their promise. Part of the responsibility lies with K-12 institutions, which do not adequately prepare students for college, and part of the fault lies with the two-year sector, which often fails to provide enough structure and guidance to undergraduates. And part of the fault must be laid at the feet of four-year colleges and universities, which make transferring from community colleges difficult to understand and challenging to achieve. In this report, the authors recommend that states immediately begin to increase community college funding in order to boost opportunities for students. The authors also call for the creation of a new federal-state partnership for community colleges in which states must agree to do their part in order to qualify for new federal investments in two-year institutions. This report proceeds in three parts. The first lays out the stakes--why it is important to establish the true cost of a community college education and provide two-year institutions with the resources they need. The second part examines the four key steps that K-12 costing-out studies take; outlines four critical differences between pre-collegiate and community college education; and delineates eight concrete recommendations that provide a framework for how this research should be conducted in the future. The third part of the report articulates a plan for how policy leaders could use new empirical evidence provided by a community college costing-out study to inform policymaking. [This report was prepared by the Century Foundation Working Group on Community College Financial Resources.]