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This book is intended to improve understanding about the complex issues surrounding the national college completion agenda. By highlighting the origins of this agenda and the dilemmas and opportunities it creates for community colleges, The Completion Agenda in Community Colleges: What It Is, Why It Matters, And Where It’s Going describes the many innovations underway nationally. The book is an effort to bridge gaps between practice, policy, and research to provide the reader with a holistic view of community college response to the completion agenda. While this agenda is a positive development it also raises some critical questions. What is the appropriate balance between open access and ensuring more students earn a credential? What can policymakers do to incent innovation among institutions without jeopardizing the strengths of community colleges? In an era of constrained resources, how can colleges improve outcomes when so many students enroll academically unprepared? And perhaps most importantly, how can we collectively increase these outcomes while also ensuring that the credentials attained are high quality and with labor market value?
This volume profiles some of the innovative reforms community college practitioners are engaged in, focusing on supporting students through to graduation. While much has been written at the federal and state levels about the need to improve student completion rates, this volume translates that imperative into action at the campus level. It presents the practitiners' voices and experiences in: Changing academic content Pedagogy Student support services And other critical components of community colleges. Each chapter focuses on either a particular campus-based reform or on a cross-cutting approach or set of issues relevant for most campuses. The volume highlights opportunities, describes challenges and how they were overcome, and provides guidance that can be used by other postsecondary practitioners involved in large-scale—campus, multi-campus, or system-level—reforms that aim to increase student success. This is the 167th 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.
This volume provides practical ways colleges can focus on the College Completion Agenda. Originally begun as an economic workforce issue for the Obama administration, the College Completion Agenda has been adopted by myriad educational institutions, public and private funders, and others. The identified “Big Goal” is to increase the proportion of Americans with high quality college degrees and credentials from 39% of the population to 60% by 2025. To date, much advice has been offered to colleges about what the issues are and what needs to be done. However, there is considerable work being done at colleges around the country to address the identified issues. This volume introduces some of these policies and practices—the thinking behind them, research supporting them, roles to be fulfilled, and impact on the student experience This is the 164th volume of this Jossey-Bass higher education quarterly report series, an essential guide for presidents, vice presidents, deans, and other leaders in today's open-door institutions, this quarterly provides expert guidance in meeting the challenges of their distinctive and expanding educational mission.
America’s community colleges are experiencing the most creative and substantive period of transformation in their 118-year history. There has never been so much research, so much support from foundations, and so much commitment from national leaders to reimagine community colleges for today and for the future. 13 Ideas that Are Transforming the Community College World, edited by Terry U. O’Banion, is the seminal work that captures the major ideas faced by community college leaders in this period of transformation. The book includes 23 authors representing 12 national organizations, perhaps the most significant and substantive list of individuals ever to participate in an edited book on the community college. Each author is a nationally-recognized authority on his or her chapter, and all have played major roles as leaders of national organizations.
Publisher description.
"This volume profiles some of the innovative reforms community college practitioners are engaged in, focusing on supporting students through to graduation. Much has been written at the federal and state levels about the need to improve student completion rates; this volume translates that imperative into action at the campus level. With most chapters written or cowritten by practitioners, the volume presents their voices and experiences in the work of changing academic content, pedagogy, student support services, and other critical components of community colleges. Each chapter focuses on either a particular campus-based reform or on a cross-cutting approach or set of issues relevant for most campuses. The volume highlights opportunities, describes challenges and how they were overcome, and provides guidance that can be used by other postsecondary practitioners involved in large-scale -- campus, multi-campus, or system-level -- reforms that aim to increase student success"--Page 4 of cover.
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.
'Honorable Mention' 2016 PROSE Award - Education Theory Today, community colleges enroll 40% of all undergraduates in the United States. In the years ahead, these institutions are expected to serve an even larger share of this student population. However, faced with increasing government pressure to significantly improve student completion rates, many community colleges will be forced to reconsider their traditional commitment to expand educational opportunity. Community colleges, therefore, are at a crossroads. Should they focus on improving student completion rates and divert resources from student recruitment programs? Should they improve completion rates by closing developmental studies programs and limiting enrollment to college-ready students? Or, can community colleges simultaneously expand educational opportunity and improve student completion? In John Dewey and the Future of Community College Education, Cliff Harbour argues that before these questions can be answered, community colleges must articulate the values and priorities that will guide them in the future. Harbour proposes that leaders across the institution come together and adopt a new democracy-based normative vision grounded in the writings of John Dewey, which would call upon colleges to do much more than improve completion rates and expand educational opportunity. It would look beyond the national economic measures that dominate higher education policy debates today and would prioritize individual student growth and the development of democratic communities. Harbour argues that this, in turn, would help community colleges contribute to the vital work of reconstructing American democracy. John Dewey and the Future of Community College Education is essential reading for all community college advocates interested in taking a more active role in developing the community college of the future.
Complete the Agenda in Higher Education: Challenge Beliefs about Student Success is a bold call to action to do more than just improve college completion rates. This book is for community college board members, administrators, faculty and staff who also want to: (1) foster beliefs that will enable students to finish what they start; (2) empower students to overcome daily challenges and real adversity; and (3) transform human potential into achievement, for a lifetime. Courageous educators, foundations, associations and researchers made community colleges better than we were a decade ago. Completion rates have improved somewhat as a result, but too many students still do not finish because the Completion Agenda is incomplete. This book describes compelling reasons why a shift from a “completion-only-mindset” to the Beliefs Agenda (completion with GRIT) is critical for the future of America. It provides practical implementation methods, offers engaging teaching tactics, and proposes sensible strategies.