This chapter illustrates the potential promise and complexities of free college initiatives from the perspective of administrators, faculty, staff, and students who are involved in a scholarship program at a small Midwestern community college. Based on two waves of interviews conducted in 2019 and 2021 respectively, we found that, while largely…

Caring Campus-Faculty is a program that supports faculty as they develop and implement "behavioral commitments" designed to help students feel a sense of belonging and to support them in their educational journey. Developed by the Institute for Evidence-Based Change, Caring Campus was evaluated by the Community College Research Center…

This chapter summarizes major findings from the national evaluation of TAACCCT pertaining to systems and organizational changes made by community colleges. These results are integrated with other findings presented in this volume to highlight lessons learned about the implementation of TAACCCT and its legacy for long-term changes in the community…

This chapter considers difficulties with traditionally organized developmental math course sequences from the literature and practice. We then report initial student success findings following the system-wide implementation of a corequisite model in developmental math.

This chapter describes the challenges and practical barriers community colleges face when implementing comprehensive reform, exploring how reforms are leading to some improvements but not often scaled improvements.

This chapter discusses the work of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, highlighting institutes the Center hosts and work that comes from these meetings. Examples of interventions that evolved from the High-Impact Practices Institutes conducted by the Center are provided. The chapter concludes with a discussion about implementation…

This chapter describes the process and challenges of implementing a civic engagement graduation requirement at Kingsborough Community College.

At a time when the nation is focusing so much attention on college completion, what do we know about how students are completing their community college programs? Does the open-access mission of community colleges translate into equitable outcomes? Pathways to Results (PTR) engages practitioners in using data to close equity gaps for student…

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.

Transfer education centering on the liberal arts declined relatively beginning in the late 1960s with the expansion of vocational education. But the distinctions blurred as courses that matched university programs in business and health fields grew. By the 1970s more than half all associate degrees awarded were to students from occupational…

Although many of the issues facing community colleges are similar, rural community colleges face additional leadership challenges due to limited resources, geographic isolation, and static economies. This chapter focuses on the impact of location on the interpretation and development of the leadership competencies. The chapter concludes with…

From 1998 to 2008, the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) offered its employees a variety of options for formation, a type of reflective practice. The district encompasses 10 locations, seven of them independently accredited colleges. Formation is based primarily on Parker Palmer's model for Circles of Trust as described in "A…

How did Washington create a clear organizational structure that assigns responsibility for each aspect of transfer policy to the group that is best suited to manage it (Kisker, Wagoner, and Cohen, 2011)? In this chapter, the authors will introduce the agencies, organizations, and entities that have played a key role in gathering information,…

This chapter presents an overview of a new tiered mentoring program (TMP) operating at Bellevue Community College in Washington. The program links students with peers, faculty, staff, and administrators via a tiered structure whereby first-year students are mentored by upper-level students, who in turn are mentored by professionals in the…

Discusses the implementation of a program at Kapi'olani Community College (Hawaii) integrating service learning into a multicultural writing curriculum and reviews results. Indicates that the program focuses on service as the civic responsibility of an educated citizenry and explores how service-related values are reflected in contemporary…