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.

Shedding light on the inner workings of one of the most important public institutions in the nation, Pathways to Reform provides the first full account of how, despite opposition, a complex higher education initiative was realized. -- From jacket flap

"The use of solitary confinement in prisons became common with the rise of the modern penitentiary during the first half of the nineteenth century and his since remained a feature of many prison systems all over the world. Solitary confinement is used for a panoply of different reasons although research tells us that these practices have widespread negative health effects. Besides the death penalty, it is arguably the most punitive and dangerous intervention available to state authorities in democratic nations. Nevertheless, in the United States there are currently an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners in small cells for more than 22 hours per day with little or no social contact and no physical contact visits with family or friends. Even in Scandinavia, thousands of prisoners are placed in solitary confinement every year and with an alarming frequency. These facts have spawned international interest in this topic and a growing international reform movement, which includes researchers, litigators, and human rights defenders as well as prison staff and prisoners. This book is the first to take a broad international comparative approach and to apply an interdisciplinary lens to this subject. In this volume neuroscientists, high-level prison officials, social and political scientists, medical doctors, lawyers, and former prisoners and their families from different countries will address the effects and practices of prolonged solitary confinement and the movement for its reform and abolition"--

Pathways to Transformation: Learning in Relationship is an edited collection that synthesizes current research on transformative learning and expands the current knowledge-base. This book is timely and significant as it provides a synthesis of some of the most exciting research in two fields: adult education and human services. The objectives of this themed edited collection, Pathways to Transformation: Learning in Relationship, are threefold. First, this collection serves as a space to synthesize current research on transformative learning. Through an extensive literature review, the editors have discerned several important strands of research in the area of transformative learning and solicited chapters dealing with these topics. The second objective of the collection is to expand the current knowledge-base in the area of transformative learning by creating a space for dialog on the subject and bringing together diverse voices. The third objective of the collection is to transcend the field of adult education, with a specific goal to reach an audience in human services (psychology, counseling, social work, marriage and family therapy).

Several years after the Arab Spring began, democracy remains elusive in the Middle East. While Tunisia has made progress towards democracy, other countries that overthrew their rulers - Egypt, Yemen, and Libya - remain in authoritarianism and instability. This volume provides a foundational exploration of the Arab Spring's successes and failures.

Higher Education System Reform provides a comparative analysis of the position of 12 Higher Education Systems since the Bologna Declaration of 1999. It discusses and reflects on the original Bologna goals, the adopted paths of reform and the achieved results.