Understanding Community Colleges provides a comprehensive review of the community college landscape--management and governance, finance, student demographics and development, teaching and learning, policy, faculty, and workforce development--and bridges the gap between research and practice. This contributed volume brings together highly respected scholars in the field who rely upon substantial theoretical perspectives--critical theory, social theory, institutional theory, and organizational theory--for a rich and expansive analysis of community colleges. The latest text to publish in the Core Concepts in Higher Education series, this exciting new text fills a gap in the higher education literature available for students enrolled in Higher Education and Community College graduate programs. This text provides students with: A review of salient research related to the community college field. Critical theoretical perspectives underlying current policies. An understanding of how theory links to practice, including focused end-of-chapter discussion questions. A fresh examination of emerging issues and insight into contemporary community college practices and policy.

This book is about American community colleges, during the period from 1965-1980, and presents a comprehensive study useful for everyone concerned with higher education. It includes data summaries on students, faculty, curriculum, and many other quantifiable dimensions of the institutions. The data, descriptions, and analyses can be used by administrators--to learn about practices that have proved effective; curriculum planners--who anticipated program revision; faculty members--seeking ideas to modify their classes; and trustees and policy makers--for interesting financial and administrative guidelines.

What do equity-oriented practices look like in different community college contexts? Given the increasing role of the community college in realizing equitable outcomes for students, examples of what practitioners are doing to move forward an equity agenda are urgently needed. The diverse perspectives and issues in these chapters explicitly advance an equity agenda and offer: Conceptual and empirical rationales to support equity-oriented practices, Examples of programming and practice that support the lives and livelihoods of underserved student populations, and Examples of policy, programming, and thinking that emphasize the role of the community college in expanding educational opportunity for underserved students. Driven by a change in thinking and imagination, these examples show how practitioners can—and should—tailor programming in light of larger patterns of inequality. This is the 172nd 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.

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.

Facing a new round of criticisms on the quality of undergraduate education in American colleges and universities, higher education administrators are eager to find—or create—effective programs and practices that can enrich student experiences and enhance outcomes. In order to do that, those who work at colleges and universities need to have a better understanding of their students. Institutional researchers, with access to a wealth of student data, have the analytical expertise to supply information that can guide institutional policy and practice. Typological frameworks particularly can be used to generate such information, and this volume presents rich examples of typological approaches to the study of college students. Typological research can reveal patterns in students’ characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors and how those patterns are related to desirable outcomes such as learning and persistence, or to the nature, meaning, and utility of student-faculty interactions outside the classroom. Such information can help campus leaders and other concerned groups gain a deeper understanding of their students, design better targeted and intentional interventions to optimize student experiences, and maximize student learning and personal development outcomes. This is a special supplemental issue of New Directions for Institutional Research. Always timely and comprehensive, this series provides planners and administrators in all types of academic institutions with guidelines in such areas as resource coordination, information analysis, program evaluation, and institutional management.

Explore an important, yet understudied concept: faculty scholarly learning. Taking a broad view, this volume explains how scholarly learning is defined and conceptualized by scholars. The authors synthesize the recent literature and organize the findings according to Boyers four forms of scholarship (discovery, teaching, engagement, and integration). They then offer a counternarrative to faculty scholarly learning and the ways in which it is enacted and supported. Recommendations for developing, supporting, and evaluating faculty scholarly learning are also presented. This volume answers: What does scholarly learning look like at different types of institutions? What contexts and/or supports hinder or help faculty members scholarly learning at the different institutional types? What challenges are noted in the extant literature on faculty work around further study or better understanding of faculty members scholarly learning across institutional types? This is the second issue of the 43rd volume of the Jossey-Bass series ASHE Higher Education Report. Each monograph is the definitive analysis of a tough higher education issue, based on thorough research of pertinent literature and institutional experiences. Topics are identified by a national survey. Noted practitioners and scholars are then commissioned to write the reports, with experts providing critical reviews of each manuscript before publication.