In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.

Developing Learning Agility: Using the Burke Assessments is intended to give the reader a set of practical activities they can apply in work situations to develop the 38 items found in the assessments. This book complements Learning Agility: The Key to Leader Potential, our first book on this subject. After learning about the nine dimensions of the Burke Assessment and that each of the 38 items on the assessment are behavioral, the next step is learning how to develop each of those items or behaviors. That is the focus of this book.

Affirmative Development makes the case theoretically for deliberate intervention to develop academic ability for students not naturally disposed to develop such ability by the conditions under which they live. The book includes discussions of intellective competence and intellective character as products of the development of academic ability and reviews of the research evidence for the feasibility and morality of such action.

For much of the twentieth century, the definition of success for most community colleges revolved around student retention and graduation. This definition no longer works—if it ever did. In Student Success in the Community College: What Really Works? respected community college leaders, researchers, and innovators argue that student success is about redesigning community colleges in a manner that is consistent with each college’s mission, goals, student population, and resources. Concluding that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to increasing student success, chapter authors analyze national, state, and regional efforts to increase student success; identify principles institutions can use to frame student success initiatives; and outline specific actions community colleges can take to increase student—and institutional—success. Student Success in the Community College: What Really Works? also provides concrete examples of effective student success initiatives in a variety of community college settings.

The federal bureaucratic role -- The procedural process -- Policy actors' influence -- Strategies and powers of influence -- The role of policy actors' beliefs -- Higher education rulemaking in context -- The use and influence of technology