Redesigning America’s Community Colleges
Title | Redesigning America’s Community Colleges PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas R. Bailey |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 301 |
Release | 2015-04-09 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 0674368282 |
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.
The Costs of Completion
Title | The Costs of Completion PDF eBook |
Author | Robin G. Isserles |
Publisher | JHU Press |
Pages | 349 |
Release | 2021-12-07 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 1421442086 |
To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.
Student Success in the Community College
Title | Student Success in the Community College PDF eBook |
Author | Terry U. O'Banion |
Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield |
Pages | 220 |
Release | 2020-12-15 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 1475856334 |
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.
Community College Success
Title | Community College Success PDF eBook |
Author | Isa Adney |
Publisher | Norlightspress.com |
Pages | 182 |
Release | 2012-02 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 9781935254621 |
While community colleges give first-generation students a chance to open the door to education, simply walking through that door is not enough. Once there, many students feel completely alone. As members of a rapidly growing population, these students are in desperate need of a practical, friendly, and useful resource.
Austerity Blues
Title | Austerity Blues PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Fabricant |
Publisher | JHU Press |
Pages | 321 |
Release | 2016-11 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 1421420678 |
Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
College Success
Title | College Success PDF eBook |
Author | David L. Strickland |
Publisher | |
Pages | 323 |
Release | 2015 |
Genre | College student orientation |
ISBN | 9781627513593 |
A comprehensive, student-centered reading and study guide instructors and students can use in a college success course.
Comprehensive Reform for Student Success
Title | Comprehensive Reform for Student Success PDF eBook |
Author | Nan L. Maxwell |
Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
Pages | 100 |
Release | 2017-01-19 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 1119348390 |
Community colleges face pressure to “do more with less” that have prompted many college leaders to consider fundamental changes to the ways they have typically done business. Because piecemeal solutions have not often been effective or efficient, colleges are moving far beyond discreet “programs” or “interventions,” and are attempting to implement comprehensive reform efforts. This volume conceptualizes comprehensive reform as being marked by: a focus on student success; a theory of change that ties programmatic components together in an intentional and cohesive package, implemented at multiple levels throughout the college and touching the majority of students; and a culture of evidence that uses data to continuously assess programs and processes against student success. Presenting original analyses that describe the rationale for comprehensive reform, this volume examines the challenges involved in implementing, evaluating, and sustaining those efforts. This is the 176th volume of this Jossey-Bass quarterly report series. Essential to the professional libraries of presidents, vice presidents, deans, and other leaders in today's open-door institutions, New Directions for Community Colleges provides expert guidance in meeting the challenges of their distinctive and expanding educational mission.