The Toolbox Revisited is a data essay that follows a nationally representative cohort of students from high school into postsecondary education, and asks what aspects of their formal schooling contribute to completing a bachelor's degree by their mid-20s. The universe of students is confined to those who attended a four-year college at any time, thus including students who started out in other types of institutions, particularly community colleges.

Scholarly evidence indicates that almost fifty percent of people who commence higher education delay completing their studies, and other dropouts. Most governments have introduced a policy that requires students to complete their studies within a limited time, especially the research students (master's and doctoral degree students). The implementation of the policy has also caused tension in higher education students' learning and supervision. Academics have debated and written about the problem widely, and it is no longer a discreet encounter for higher education stakeholders. Despite the scholarly effort of disclosing the challenges' depth, no literature has adequately supported students to implement the policy effectively and successfully. This book attempts to fill the gap by guiding higher education students on observing ten major principles for timely and successful completion. If students perceive, learn, and practice the guidance in this book, they will attain their degree anywhere (in a physical setting, online, home, and abroad) worldwide. The principles might be useful in the orientation programs for first-year students in universities and colleges. First, students ought to comprehend factors that might contribute to the delay completion and dropout. Second, they must analyze and communicate their needs and requirements from the beginning of their enrolment while re-examining their association, networking, self-management, and self-leadership. The book also reminds higher education students to build healthy habits to support developing cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains and remain active and creative. Four categories of students' personalities are discussed to urge students to evaluate who they are and whether they are problem solvers, informers, implementers, or workforce to society. The understanding can support them chose the projects that align with what they are to society. Self-awareness and leadership may make the learning task more manageable, enjoyable, and meaningful, and filling the knowledge gap can be realized timely.

Even as the number of students attending college has more than doubled in the past forty years, it is still the case that nearly half of all college students in the United States will not complete their degree within six years. It is clear that much remains to be done toward improving student success. For more than twenty years, Vincent Tinto’s pathbreaking book Leaving College has been recognized as the definitive resource on student retention in higher education. Now, with Completing College, Tinto offers administrators a coherent framework with which to develop and implement programs to promote completion. Deftly distilling an enormous amount of research, Tinto identifies the essential conditions enabling students to succeed and continue on within institutions. Especially during the early years, he shows that students thrive in settings that pair high expectations for success with structured academic, social, and financial support, provide frequent feedback and assessments of their performance, and promote their active involvement with other students and faculty. And while these conditions may be worked on and met at different institutional levels, Tinto points to the classroom as the center of student education and life, and therefore the primary target for institutional action. Improving retention rates continues to be among the most widely studied fields in higher education, and Completing College carefully synthesizes the latest research and, most importantly, translates it into practical steps that administrators can take to enhance student success.

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.