While most community college students enroll part-time, there is little evidence on how to effectively improve college attainment of part-time students. This mixed methods study, situated in Texas, addresses this research gap by developing a more complete understanding of the part-time student population, their challenges and needs, as well as the…

W.S. 21-18-202 (h)(iii) mandates that the Wyoming Community College Commission (WCCC) develop performance benchmarks, outcome measures and other performance indicators which serve as the basis for annual reporting to the Wyoming Legislature and the Governor. The annual reporting must include, but is not limited to, the following measures: (1)…

Demands on higher education institutions are growing. Stakeholders are demanding proof of quality to ensure students are receiving the education they are paying for. Institutional accountability is a growing concern for higher education institutions, more specifically community colleges. The diverse characteristics of community colleges have made…

Over the past decade, educators and policymakers have sought to increase the number of students pursuing and completing postsecondary credentials. Community colleges play an important role in efforts to increase the percentage of Americans with postsecondary education. Community colleges play an important role in educating the early childhood…

Concerns over the United States' global standing have spurred a national focus on improving postsecondary attainment. At the same time, many sectors of the economy find they have difficulty recruiting highly trained individuals to fill the good jobs that exist; jobs like nursing, respiratory care, dental hygiene, and various mid-level management…

This Fiscal Year 2011-2014 Strategic Plan (this Plan) addresses the key outcome-oriented goals below, focusing on reaching the President's 2020 goal. These goals focus on improving student achievement to increase high school graduation, college completion, and educational attainment--all measures of how the country is performing and how far it has…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether community college administrators in the state of Michigan believe that commonly known quality and continuous improvement tools, prevalent in a manufacturing environment, can be adapted to a community college model. The tools, specifically Six Sigma, benchmarking and process mapping have played a…

The coming five to ten years will drop community colleges into a lot of hot water. The question is this: Will community colleges sense the danger and jump out, or will they simply try to acclimate and get cooked? The theses of this article are that: (1) current trends in the external environment of community colleges constitute such an…

Over the past year, in a process to select the winner of the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, the Aspen Institute has convened national experts to define and determine how to measure "excellence," to identify community colleges with high levels of student success, and to help more community colleges understand what can be done to…

As colleges increasingly understand the importance of intentionally engaging students, the field must turn to the game-changing challenge: "bringing high-impact practices to scale as part of a concerted effort to increase college completion rates." In an era of growing demand, shrinking budgets, and greater accountability, meeting this…

Reverse transferring, or moving from a four-year institution to a community college, has been depicted in recent research as one of the major forms of student mobility. Since reverse transferring is associated with extremely low rates of degree completion, it is critical to better understand the predictors of reverse transferring and what happens…

This fourth edition of the "ES Review" brings together, in one setting, some of the best work from 2009-10. It features: (1) Teacher Quality (Teachers at Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design (Elena Silva); Understanding Teachers Contracts (Andrew J. Rotherham); How Teachers Unions Lost the Media (Richard Whitmire and…

The Critical Success Factors Report is the North Carolina Community College System's major accountability document. This annual performance report serves to inform colleges and the public on the performance of North Carolina's 58 community colleges. In 1993, the State Board of Community Colleges began monitoring performance data on specific…

This is a report about a unique postsecondary education system, the Tennessee Technology Centers--a statewide system of 27 institutions providing a wide range of rigorous, one to two year, technical/occupational education programs at consistently high completion and placement rates in high skill and relatively high wage employment. This report…

After decades of focusing on expansion and access, California's institutions of higher education are now being handed a more difficult charge: to dramatically increase the number of college graduates with diminishing state funding. There is a growing consensus that the United States needs to ratchet up its production of college graduates to turn…