Community colleges have always been good stepping stones to four-year colleges. But despite a number of programs that promise admission to four-year schools upon completion of a two-year associate program, many transfer students fail to meet the standards for a baccalaureate degree. A National Center for Education Statistics report found that of…

In fall 2007, the state of Colorado received one of four federal grants from the Ready for College (RFC) grant program of the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE), U.S. Department of Education. The Colorado (CO) SUN project (where SUN stands for Success UNlimited) was designed to identify and enhance innovative practices from Colorado's…

An alarmingly high percentage of recent high school graduates are not prepared to succeed in college-level courses, and the impact of this educational shortcoming is substantial. Underprepared college students incur a monetary cost of enrolling in remedial courses, and states and taxpayers subsidize much of the overall cost of developmental…

Among the diverse and varied missions of community colleges is the provision of instruction for students who have either been underserved by their previous educational institutions or not had the opportunity to complete high school. Included under this umbrella are low-performing high school students, individuals with low basic skills, and those…

This qualitative study explores career counseling and guidance services as provided to students engaged in career and technical education programs at three sites in the United States. The sites, consisting of high schools and community colleges, were part of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education's 5-year studies of…

The community college as the entranceway into the baccalaureate degree is becoming a prevalent choice for students. This study was a qualitative approach to understanding attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge acquisition by successful community college transfer students. University students who transferred from a community college and were making…

One program designed to prepare first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented students to transition from high school to college are early college high school programs which allow qualified students to simultaneously obtain high school diplomas and associate's degrees. However, little is known about how students and faculty perceive such…

The focus of this study was the experience of students who had successfully achieved the transition from foster care to enrollment in Virginia Community Colleges. The following questions guided the inquiry: How do students who are emancipating from foster care describe their transition to enrollment at one of the Virginia Community Colleges? What…

Three teacher educators worked at a US community college with two adult education staff on a grant-supported project bridging high school dropouts from adult education to employment. The teacher educators' apparently simple task of facilitating grant participants' engagement with action research became confusingly challenging. The consultants…

Black Hawk College (BHC) is a comprehensive community college serving all or part of nine counties and a population of approximately 224,510 residents in a mostly rural area of north-west Illinois. This practice was fully developed and implemented for the Shifting Gears (SG) initiative during the 2007-08 academic years. Heeding BHC's strategic…

Higher education and the military have been linked throughout history in the United States. Now, with the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the higher education community is beginning to realize again the importance of understanding student veterans' transition experiences into college and providing appropriate support programs. However, the…

Northampton Community College (NCC) responded to an industry identified need within the regional biotechnology community for entry-level production workers in biomanufacturing. In an effort to meet this need and create a transitional program of study for dislocated and incumbent workers, NCC partnered with the local Workforce Investment Boards,…

This paper presents a case study in which the authors attempted to understand the impact, on student choice, of reforms in tertiary education in Australia, namely, a shift towards a demand-driven system and the blurring of the distinction between vocational education and training (VET) and higher education. The authors compared the advanced…

This ex post facto study evaluated Achieving a College Education (ACE) Plus program, a credit-based transition program between a high school district and a community college. Achieving a College Education Plus is an early outreach program. It is designed to aid at-risk students in graduating from high school and making a smooth transition to…

This report is an in-depth case study of the Pathway to the Baccalaureate program at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA). The purpose of the case study is to describe in vivid detail the struggles of nontraditional college students and to show one college's innovative ideas for assisting these students. The Pathway to the Baccalaureate…