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…

Objective/Research Question: This paper reports on data collected in a multi-year National Science Foundation grant project involving a professional development (PD) model built to support community college faculty as change agents (CAs). The research question was: How do disciplinary communities of practice (CoP) emerge among community college…

Background: Most community college students from low-income families have ambitious educational degree goals, but only a small fraction attains them. For many decades, sociologists have primarily attributed this problem to a cooling out process in which college practitioners diminish students' educational ambitions using academic reorientation…

To support the long-term success of underprepared students, many community colleges are experimenting with accelerated developmental education models, which allow students to complete remediation and enroll in college-level math and English within a shorter time frame. This study examines three developmental acceleration programs, including two in…

Anticipated retirements and relatively short tenure in office create a shortage of community college presidents in the United States. To fill the unprecedented number of vacancies requires a cadre of candidates well prepared for the demands of the position. Using Satir's change model as a theoretical framework, this year-long reflective study…

Community colleges play a key role in educating the large number of non-traditional, low-income, and under-prepared students who have entered higher education in the past several decades. Despite increased access, community colleges are struggling to graduate students. Most, if not all, strategies provided by scholars to improve college completion…

Recent improprieties by community college administrators have scarred the public trust. Efforts to secure against maladministration are firmly rooted in utilitarian and deontological ethics. In this article, the authors argue that these common approaches cannot remedy maladministration in the community college because utilitarianism and deontology…

This article encourages community college leaders to employ ethical paradigms when constructing and considering alternative courses of action in decision-making processes. The authors discuss four previously articulated paradigms (e.g., ethic of justice, ethic of critique, ethic of care, and ethic of the profession) and propose an additional…

Objective: This study analyzes how ethnicity, gender, and non-traditional student characteristics relate to differential online versus face-to-face outcomes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses at community colleges. Method: This study used a sample of 3,600 students in online and face-to-face courses matched by…

Employing interviews with individuals from 16 community colleges across the country, as well as an independent consultant engaged in activities of the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE), this study considers the organizational structures and academic practices associated with community college entrepreneurship…

This study examines how interactions with institutional agents (faculty and academic counselors) and select student support programs influence success (i.e., grade point average) and intentions to persist to degree completion for Latino/a community college students. Using social capital theory and college impact models, the study controls for the…

Due to the decrease in public funding, community colleges are in a position where they need to generate private gifts. Alumni represent the largest untapped pool of prospective donors, and the success of alumni giving at 4-year institutions illustrates the potential that exists for community colleges. To develop effective fundraising strategies,…

Using data from more than 2,000 community college science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors in the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, this research investigates how ethnicity, gender, non-traditional student risk factors, academic preparation, socio-economic status, and English-as-second-language/citizenship status…

Two related themes currently dominate discourse on open-access colleges, particularly community colleges: increasing college-going and degree attainment and improving the performance of postsecondary institutions with respect to producing graduates. Largely missing from this discourse, however, is cogency concerning the innumerable ways in which…

Career and technical education (CTE) students pursuing occupational associate's degrees or certificates differ from students seeking academic majors at 2-year institutions in several ways. This article examines several theoretical models of student persistence and offers a conceptual model of student success focused on CTE students in community…