Prior to the Guided Pathways movement, a litany of research in community colleges showed that course placement was inaccurate and ineffective. This article argues that placement might be redesigned, addressing erroneous assumptions about student success in service of pathways. This new placement would integrate three main areas of student success…

Community colleges play a vital role in providing access to higher educational opportunities for their communities. College completion rates for community colleges, however, have been historically low and few students graduate within a two-year timeframe. Disaggregating these data also reveals significant equity gaps in these outcomes for many…

This chapter examines undergraduate research (UR) from student, faculty, and institutional perspectives. We explore UR implementation models in community colleges, discuss selected examples of practice, present a summary of lessons learned, and make recommendations to advance UR and its early execution into the college curriculum from a holistic…

This research study investigated the experiences of community college leaders using the guided pathways model to increase student retention. As a conceptual framework, the study utilized Tinto's integration theory of student dropout behavior. While previous research has focused on understanding the guided pathways processes and stakeholders'…

This article focuses on how adjunct faculty at a large Midwestern community college enact pedagogies of care, which is a teaching philosophy and practice grounded in a deep and holistic care for students.

First-generation college students are a prominent higher education student population and are well-represented at the community college. Unfortunately, many first-generation community college students do not persist for degree completion. These students face many academic and social challenges that impact their persistence. However, research has…

Academic libraries have long been called the heart of their campuses. As priorities have shifted away from print collections and other repository services, college libraries have expanded their services to be welcoming spaces that support students' sense of belonging and meet a wide range of needs. This is perhaps especially true of community…

Research consistently describes the large percentage of community college students who struggle to meet their basic needs such as food and housing. These challenges may be exacerbated for students in rural communities. At the same time, we are also learning more about the connection between addressing students' basic needs and improving their…

College fluency can help students successfully engage with and self-advocate within the culture and bureaucracy of higher education institutions to achieve their goals. To further examine and develop effective strategies to foster college fluency, the Borough of Manhattan Community College Library (BMCC) and Ithaka S+R partnered on the College…

Drawing on findings from the author's recently published COVID-19 study (Strayhorn, 2022), the purpose of this article is to highlight some of the major lessons that HEI leaders learned while navigating the uncertainties of the global pandemic, especially in terms of fostering a strong sense of belonging. First, the author defines sense of…

In the 2023 Legislative Session, the Legislature charged the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) with surveying Maryland's colleges and universities on practices related to academic advising and student services. A survey was created and prepared by MHEC staff. The survey was sent to 52 institutions of higher education across the state. Of…

College athletes at the community college level, specifically athletes of color, may experience unique threats to their belonging along multiple dimensions, including but not limited to academic spaces of learning, assessing their athletic merit by comparing themselves to Division I athletes, and racialized tensions within white-centric campuses.…

The community college serves a diverse undergraduate student population and community. Since its inception over a century ago, the mission of the community college has been to provide access and to be inclusive by offering courses that support historically disadvantaged populations, university transfer students, developmental education courses to…

The dominant educational paradigm is rooted in a Platonic, Cartesian, and Piagetian mind-supremacist epistemology that subordinates the body and experience to the mind, ideas, and objective concepts. This reduces students to cognitive receptors of information in a detached, decontextualized, and dehumanizing classroom, i.e., the banking…

For decades, community colleges have relied on standardized placement tests to determine student readiness for college-level coursework. COVID-19 exposed the flaws of relying on a single measure to assess student readiness as many test sites shut down during the pandemic. Previous research has also pointed out the high rate of misplacement when…