Community colleges in the United States, which serve a disproportionate number of students from low-income backgrounds, can provide a valuable pathway toward well-paying careers. However, graduation rates at community colleges are very low--among first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students who enter public two-year schools, only 29 percent…

Objective: This study examines how accurately a small set of short-term academic indicators can approximate long-term outcomes of community college students so that decision-makers can take informed actions based on those indicators to evaluate the current progress of large-scale reform efforts on long-term outcomes, which in practice will not be…

In this article, researchers from the Community College Research Center reflect on what they have learned from their study of Guided Pathways reforms at over 100 colleges nationally since the publication in 2015 of "Redesigning America's Community Colleges." They examine five areas of practice: (1) program design; (2) new student…

In 2015, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) announced the AACC Pathways Project, a national initiative designed to support a cohort of community colleges to implement and scale whole-college guided pathways reforms. Thirty community colleges from 17 states were selected for the project and embraced the challenge of redesigning…

Lesson Study (LS) is a structured, collaborative professional development approach that gives instructors a framework for actively investigating how to improve student learning in their classrooms. Despite evidence of LS improving teacher practice and student learning in K-12 settings, there have been few documented examples of its use among…

Each year, the country's most selective four-year institutions invest significant resources to recruit talented high school students from across the country. These students, mostly affluent and white, contemplate admission offers and consider moves to new locales to pursue their postsecondary plans. Yet, many of these selective institutions are…

Community colleges continue to operate in a society of accountability and efficiencies. Throughout the country, states have implemented performance-based funding and completion agendas while also tightening or restricting funding for higher education. The state of Ohio has implemented one of the boldest performance funding plans in the country…

Because of the importance of faculty engagement to achieve our nationwide student completion goals, this paper comprehensively and critically reviews the conceptualizations of faculty and employee engagement in the extant literature. This review is a means to develop an improved, more inclusive, faculty engagement framework. It is a framework that…

This study evaluates the effectiveness of math placement policies for entering community college students on these students' academic success in math. We estimate the impact of placement decisions by using a discrete-time survival model within a regression discontinuity framework. The primary conclusion that emerges is that initial placement in a…

The study examined how institutional and student characteristics may influence the earning of student success points by state-supported community colleges under the Texas performance funding system that was fully implemented in the 2016-2017 biennium. Texas has historically funded community colleges based on an enrollment formula; however, the…

Community college research studies have noted that full-time faculty add quality to the curriculum and enhance the student experience, as well as comprise a significant investment in college budgets and futures. However, in the context of fluctuating patterns of student enrollments and staffing, determining which disciplines need additional…

The NYC P-TECH Grades 9-14 schools are early college and career high schools that are part of a public education reform movement in the United States and across the globe. They aim to prepare students for college and career -- not one or the other -- which is a different approach to contemporary high school reform than many others take. The…

Taking the distinction between the Institution of Apprenticeship, that is, the social partnership arrangements which underpin its organisation, and Apprenticeship as a Social Model of Learning, in other words, the configuration of pedagogic and occupational etc. dimensions which constitute the model, as its starting point the paper: (i) argues the…

This report demonstrates the power of business-higher education partnerships to create new kinds of STEM pathways that provide educational opportunity and economic mobility for underrepresented students. With funding from the National Science Foundation in 2014, the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) launched a five-year project to demonstrate…

Historically, higher education research has focused on traditional students (i.e., recent high school graduates at a residential, 4-year institutions), but community college students are quickly becoming the new traditional student (Jenkins, 2012). In the fall of 2011, more than one third (36%) of all students enrolled in postsecondary education…