A collection of twelve essays that addresses college success, discussing expectations, financial burdens, requirements, effective instruction, and other related topics.

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.

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.

College Success for Adults: Insider Tips for Effective Learning is a concise, user-friendly guide to college success for the adult college student. In it, readers learn to master the rules, vocabulary, and expectations of the college environment. They’ll discover how to balance their work and personal lives with college-level study, develop the mindset of the successful college student, take notes effectively, conquer testing anxiety, win over their professors, and much more. Armed with the knowledge this book provides, readers will emerge with a deeper understanding of what it takes to succeed in college—and how they can achieve this success. They’ll learn how to take their own experience and wisdom as adults and translate it into success in the college classroom. Readers also receive helpful supplementary resources that will aid them on their journey to college success, including a college vocabulary glossary, college knowledge quiz (with answer key), a list of scholarships exclusively for adult students, and a suggested course syllabus (with detailed course calendar).

If you’re currently a college student, or plan on being one, you need to check out this book. Written by award-winning professors Lynn Jacobs and Jeremy Hyman, it’s loaded with insider information that only professors know--but few are willing to reveal. The over 600 tips in this book will show you: How to pick good courses and avoid bad professors How to develop “college-level” skills and habits that’ll put you ahead of the pack How to get through the freshman comp, math, language, and lab science requirements--in one try How to figure out what’s going to be on the tests, and what professors are looking for in papers and presentations How to pick a major you’ll really like--and be good at How to get the edge for graduate school--or the inside track to a really good job And much more. The tips are quick and easy-to-use, and the advice is friendly and supportive. It’s as if you had your own personal professor guiding you on the path to college success.