The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the ways that legal issues can play out for community colleges. The authors use one community college campus as an example to illustrate key points. This article is structured as a conversation, which follows a format commonly used in law review symposium issues. The two authors are a senior…

Pursuant to California Education Code Section 84362, each community college district is required to allocate at least 50% of its annual education expenses, as defined by law, to the salaries and benefits of classroom instructors. This requirement ensures a significant portion of educational expenditures directly supports classroom instruction. The…

In response to concerns about the additional costs and time-to-degree associated with traditional developmental education programs, several states and postsecondary systems have implemented corequisite reform where academically underprepared students take both a developmental education course and college-level course in the same subject area…

The Institutional Effectiveness Partnership Initiative (IEPI) launched in 2014 as a collaborative effort to help districts promote student success and improve their fiscal and operational effectiveness. The initiative focuses on four major aspects of institutional effectiveness: 1) student performance and outcomes; 2) accreditation status; 3)…

The demand for strategic planning has increased at community colleges. When used as a comprehensive tool strategic planning can effectively track goals and outcomes for accreditation standards and federal requirements, which can assist institutions in ensuring compliance. This dissertation in practice examines strategic planning at Butler County…

In the spring of 2020, the US Department of Education updated Title IX guidelines addressing the way campuses investigate gender-based violence. This paper explores how then Vice President of Student Affairs at Phoenix College handled changes to Title IX compliance in the early months of the Coronavirus pandemic while also transitioning to remote…

With the growth in distance education programs and other interstate activities, community colleges increasingly need to be authorized by multiple states. State authorization provides the legal approval for postsecondary education providers to offer credentials and conduct related activities. Participation in the State Authorization Reciprocity…

For colleges and universities, the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act) presents a significant set of challenges in pursuit of campus safety. The namesake of this law followed the tragic death of Jeanne Clery, a Lehigh University Student, who was sexually assaulted and murdered in her…

In response to concerns about the additional costs and time-to-degree associated with traditional developmental education programs, several states and postsecondary systems have implemented corequisite reform where academically underprepared students take both a developmental education course and college-level course in the same subject area…

The purpose of the qualitative exploratory case study was to examine California community college administrators' perceptions of preparation for achieving full compliance in implementing California Assembly Bill (AB) No. 705. The study involved analyzing documents, a physical artifact, and archived data from 14 community colleges in southern…

Higher education regional accreditation presents problems for colleges and universities in the Southern states. Research on regional accreditation has focused on qualitative approaches to understand how institutions experience accreditation reviews or on quantitative methodologies to examine a single issue of accreditation compliance. However,…

Verification is a federally mandated process that requires selected students to further attest that the information reported on their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is accurate and complete. In this brief, we estimate institutional costs of administrating the FAFSA verification mandate and consider variation in costs by…

The proportion of students with disabilities in the postsecondary classroom has been growing, a trend that heavily impacts faculty and their teaching. The purpose of this study is to examine how community college faculty experience teaching students with disabilities. Current literature suggests faculty feel under-prepared for and lacking support…

Verification is a federally mandated process that requires selected students to further attest that the information reported on their FAFSA is accurate and complete. In this brief, we estimate institutional costs of administrating the FAFSA verification mandate and consider variation in costs by institution type and sector. Using data from 2014,…

In 1989, Congress passed the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act Amendments to address illegal alcohol and drug abuse on college campuses. To receive federal funding, each college must comply by implementing an alcohol and drug prevention program, but the federal government and some colleges have paid little attention to this policy. Recently,…