This study explored the practices and experiences of food resource managers at ten community colleges in the southwestern United States, highlighting their use of food resource rooms to assist food-insecure students. Utilizing the CFIR's domains of intervention source, inner setting, and process, the study probed into the food resource managers'…

While participation in undergraduate research has many benefits for students including increased confidence and persistence in engineering, community college students do not have the same access to research as students at four-year institutions. To address this disparity, we developed a soft robotics-focused undergraduate research lab at a…

This Perspective builds on a related RAND Corporation report that describes the implementation of Findhelp at four North Carolina community colleges in 2021 and 2022. Findhelp is an online tool to connect students to resources in their communities to help meet their basic nonacademic needs. The North Carolina Community College System, with support…

Developed by the Institute for Evidence-Based Change (IEBC), Caring Campus is at once a reform effort that colleges engage in to improve the daily experience of their students and an approach aimed at influencing the norms, values, practices, beliefs, and assumptions that comprise the culture of a college. Drawing on interviews with the presidents…

Containing costs for students in higher education is a significant priority for the Colorado Department of Higher Education and the state of Colorado. Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials licensed to be freely shared and available at no cost to students. The Department champions OER as a strategic means of meeting the demand…

To counter tuition and textbook costs for degree-seeking students, a specific pathway to a bachelor's degree in Leadership was developed. The pathway, comprised of partnerships with the high school Leadership Academy at a public high school, community college, and Old Dominion University (ODU), reduced tuition and textbook costs, allowing the…

With the mounting pressures on institutions of higher education to do more with limited resources, the opportunity to collaborate with other colleges has emerged as a viable tool to create efficiencies and obtain valuable knowledge otherwise unattainable by an institution, even if that collaboration takes place with a competing institution.…

Institutions in many jurisdictions are in the process of implementing Open Educational Resources (OER). This short paper is based on a report commissioned by Contact North/Contact Nord as part of their Pockets of Innovation series to better understand the impact of OER implementations at diverse institutions. The investigation looks into 13…

Financial aid plays an essential role not only in allowing many students to enroll in college but also in supporting them in attaining completion and success. Often, however, the total amount of aid does not come close to covering the cost of attendance for full-time students. As a result, the majority of students enrolled at two-year public…

Financial aid plays an essential role not only in allowing many students to enroll in college but also in supporting them in attaining completion and success. Often, however, the total amount of aid does not come close to covering the cost of attendance for full-time students. As a result, the majority of students enrolled at two-year public…

The Aid Like A Paycheck student survey was designed to shed light on students' academic and financial attitudes, behaviors, and circumstances over the course of a semester. This supplement to MDRC's final report on Aid Like A Paycheck describes the survey, response rates, and responses to each survey item at three community college systems: two in…

This brief describes the types of college promises that exist in the state of California. In doing so, we summarize existing research on this topic. Furthermore, we provide a framework to study the California Promise Program in community colleges in California. We use publicly available data to highlight key aspects of our proposed framework: What…

In today's world where tuition fees continue to rise rapidly and the demand for higher education increases in both the developing and developed world, it is important to find additional and alternative learning pathways that learners can afford. Traditional education as we have known it has begun to change, allowing for new parallel learning…

This chapter tells a story of course reform, describing in a fresh and candid way the steps taken toward change and the results achieved. The authors emphasize that instructors need considerable support in order to teach differently, as well as underscore the need to consider scalability of reform even at the pilot stage.

For colleges seeking to improve student outcomes, new technologies often appear to hold the promise of transformative change. Across the country, colleges are using technological tools to enhance reform efforts related to how they teach, how they provide supports to students, and how they guide students through programs of study. In order for…