The community college environment is complex and dynamic, requiring constant monitoring. To ensure that workforce education, a core component of community colleges' missions, remains aligned with colleges' environments, responsive to employers' needs, suited to students' interests and abilities, and current in content and technology, it is…

The Centers of Excellence (COE) provide regional workforce data on high growth, high demand industries and occupations for use by community colleges in program planning and resource enhancement. This article discusses the environmental scanning research methodology and its application to data-driven decision making in community college program…

This paper reports an overview of Project FOLLOW-UP, whose purpose was to develop, test, and validate a statewide management information system for follow-up of Texas public junior and community college students. The system designed is for use by machine or manual processing and is thus useful to small and large institutions while interfacing with…

A series of projects were conducted in Maryland as part of an effort to develop a valid and reliable student database for planning, decision making, and Vocational Education Data System reporting; and a systematic and objective procedure to evaluate the quality of occupational programs in Maryland's community colleges. The projects had three…

The Information Processing Planning (IPP) for Pima Community College for 1984-1987 is presented as a menu-driven computer program. First, the process of the development of the IPP is presented, including information on the college's computer task force, its membership, organization, goals, and focuses; on the purchase and upgrading of computer…

Project FOLLOW-UP was conducted to develop, test, and validate a statewide management information system for follow-up of Texas public junior and community college students. This activities manual provides an overview of the resultant student information system (TEX-SIS) and its characteristics. Seven subsystems comprise SIS, each with its own…

With the dramatic growth in the use of computers in recent years, questions have been raised concerning the role of computer education in community colleges. Four principal reasons can be advanced for implementing an academic/instructional computing program: (1) to increase computer awareness among students to prepare them for the growing number…

Student tracking systems are enabling increasing numbers of community colleges to respond to external demands for accountability with tangible measurements of student progress and institutional outcomes. Several recent trends in marketing, accountability, communications with students, and internal competition for resources have prompted interest…

Beginning in 1976, Regional Colleges were formed in Burma to implement career and technical education at the post-secondary level. This paper describes the Regional Colleges and explores the possible use of a systemic management information process that could assist in the complex planning required to develop second-year vocational and technical…

Providing an overview of the educational and fiscal accountability system for community colleges in the state of California, this paper discusses the development of the system and describes the role of the Chancellor's Office (CO) of the California Community Colleges in accountability. Following a review of state and federal programs that include…

In January 1990, project SYNERGY was launched by 19 two-year colleges and 3 four-year colleges coordinated by Miami-Dade Community College, in Florida, with support from IBM and Title III funds. The project was designed to review and compile lists of useful instructional software for basic skill remediation and develop an integrated, adaptive,…

This Matrix for Planning presents an organized format for systematically recording information relevant to the formulation of long-range planning policies and decisions for the Massachusetts Community Colleges. The matrix organizes existing data into a four-fold conceptual structure: people, programs, facilities, and funding. The first category…

California's welfare reform program, Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN), assigned the state's community colleges a major role in promoting financial self-sufficiency among welfare recipients by equipping them with marketable vocational skills. A study was conducted to determine the nature and amount of involvement of the community colleges in…

This report describes a project designed to (1) develop models for use of vocational education data available from the Oregon Management Information System (MIS) to implement decision making at key points in program planning and curriculum development, and (2) design, develop, and test a system to improve the competencies of state and local…

With respect to the college's information systems, there were three major challenges facing Ohio's Cincinnati Technical College (CTC) in 1991. The expanding use of personal computers (PC's) and non-integrated systems often duplicated efforts and data on CTC's existing computer systems, users were demanding more access to data and more integration…