Community college students need access to comprehensive reproductive health care to support them in achieving both their educational and reproductive goals. This brief highlights barriers to contraceptive access among young people attending community college and outlines policies and programs that can support access. Drawing on data from a…

Learning analytics systems are software designed to aggregate student data to be analyzed for the purpose of delivering information to students, with the goal of increasing student success, academic goal completion, and retention. Despite being identified as stakeholders and beneficiaries of learning analytics, student perceptions make up a small…

Cybersecurity workers protect crucial information across the industry spectrum, from health records to bank accounts to sensitive military communications. A massive shortage of skilled technical employees in the U.S. has put the nation's digital privacy and infrastructure at risk, observers say, leading more community colleges to include…

The purpose of this brief is to provide school-level examples of how early college practitioners are collecting and using data to improve their practices. Examples three and four are school-level data from two early college partnerships: the MetroWest CPC (Framingham, Milford, Waltham), and Lawrence. The brief begins, however, with the national…

Although the body of research about LGBTQ+ students in higher education is growing, little is known about the experiences, success rates, persistence, and graduation rates of sexual minority community college students. Researchers studying this population frequently cite a lack of available data that would assist in exploring the experiences of…

Learning analytics has emerged from a confluence of factors including expanding volumes of student data generated from learning management systems and student information systems, advanced technologies for retrieving and analyzing that data, and a desire of higher education institutions to understand more about student behavior, teaching and…

This study's objective was to evaluate community college students' access to health services, resources, and information. Five diverse Western Washington CC campuses, from June to December 2016, were evaluated. Accessibility, information, and privacy were the three variables of interest. Data were collected from three sources; first, field…

The universe of objects containing microprocessors or embedded sensors capable of communicating and transmitting information across networks is called the Internet of Things, and it has enormous implications for community colleges. Already, many colleges are saving time and money by monitoring and controlling "smart building" features…

Libraries are the central resource for supporting faculty and students in their research and information needs, both physically and remotely. This essential role of libraries and library faculty has remained consistent amid significant technological and pedagogical changes within the community college system. As librarians continue to determine…

Established in December 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Roundtable on Data Science Postsecondary Education was charged with identifying the challenges of and highlighting best practices in postsecondary data science education. Convening quarterly for 3 years, representatives from academia, industry, and…

Data breach prevention is a battle, rarely plain and never simple. For higher education institutions, the Sisyphean aspects of the task are more complex than for industry and business. Two-year colleges have payrolls and vendor contracts like those enterprises. They also have public record and student confidentiality requirements. Colleges must…

In designing online and hybrid courses, instructors should consider structure, student motivation, and interaction (per Moore's 1993 Theory of Transactional Distance). To motivate students to interact and to build course community, instructors may assign student introductions. However, after examining students' introductions in a hybrid…

This issue of "Policy Insights" provides a review of the past five years of the cost and value of higher education, which have gained increased policymaker, consumer, and media attention. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) has worked with four of its member states (Hawai'i, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington) to…

In recent years, nursing faculty incivility has been a searing topic of research. Nursing research included studies on incivility among nursing students, incivility between nursing students and nursing faculty, and incivility in the clinical setting. However, literature specifically on nursing faculty incivility was limited. This descriptive,…

While higher education institutions seem to be utilizing social media more and more, there still exist enormous challenges in trying to understand the new dynamics generated by social media in higher education, particularly for the context of community colleges. In March 2011, the author and her colleague Dr. Regina Deil-Amen (Associate Professor…