Community colleges were established as affordable postsecondary education opportunities for all residents within their local areas. Typical measures of access to postsecondary institutions use binary indicators based on the presence of institutions within geographic areas or straight-line distance between student residences and college locations…

To ascertain variance and predictive measure between respondents' self-reported time of disclosure and disability identity development while mitigating for confounding variables: social desirability, transition planning experience, visibility, ethnicity, gender, veteran status, and age, research was conducted at a public two-year institution.…

In this chapter, we examine how spatial access, the extent to which individuals must traverse space or time to reach a community college, varies by time of day across socio-demographic groups. We specifically measure spatial access as the time required to travel to a community college by public transit, a common mode of transportation for many…

Primary research questions: What stories do student parents at Maryland Community College (MCC) tell about their intersecting identities? How do student parents speak about the institutional context of MCC in these stories? What are the implications of these stories in supporting student parents at MCC? Nearly 3.8 million student parents are…

Kuh's theory of student engagement was used in this quantitative study to examine the relationship between student participation in co-curricular activities and student engagement among women in engineering programs in community colleges. Self-reported ex post facto student data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) for…

The foundation degree was introduced by David Blunkett in England in the year 2000 to widen participation and raise the skill level of the labour market. Foundation degrees have had some successes in widening participation as they are usually vocation based and appeal to the non-typical student. However, the outlook for the foundation degree is…

Offering 8-week courses in a traditional 16-week semester schedule supports degree completion; however, traditional-age students, who belonged to Generation Z, at a Southwest community college indicated a preference for 16-week courses. The problem investigated in this study was that traditional-age college students experienced barriers to…

Background or Context: The COVID-19 pandemic may be considered a focusing event that has drawn greater attention to the physical and mental health of community college students. Purpose, Objective, Research Question, or Focus of Study: This study examined community college students' self-reported life stressors pre- and post-pandemic-onset to…

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to describe the experiences of students formally enrolled in a California community college promise program at Mountain View Community College, Lakeview Community College, Hillcrest Community College, and Ocean Valley Community College, each located in Southern California. The…

This dissertation focuses on the relative shortage of female senior leaders in higher education compared to men and the potential effect of gender and personality traits on the timeline to promotion. The primary research question asked was "do gender and personality type predict time to promotion in higher education?" The research…

Evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) have been shown to benefit students in undergraduate biology, but little is known about the degree to which community college (CC) biology instructors use EBIPs or the barriers they encounter. We surveyed CC biology instructors to characterize how they use EBIPs, their capacity to use EBIPs, and…

Community college students frequently decide to withdraw from college without achieving their educational goals. In decades of research into student attrition and retention, very few studies have asked the students themselves why they chose to leave. This concurrent triangulation mixed methods study sought to add to the literature by analyzing…

Most students who enter a community college never finish. In fact, "fewer than four of every ten complete any type of degree or certificate within six years" (Bailey et al., 2015). One reason for low success rates is the lack of high-quality, frequent feedback provided to students. Feedback has been shown to improve student learning and…

The term "throughput" refers to the percentage of a student cohort who complete a course sequence within a set period after having begun that sequence at the same point in time. Under AB 705 the set period for observing throughput rates is described in law as "one year". While that time frame seems intuitive enough, the…

Single-parent students are predominantly female, identified as a marginalized group, and a growing population on community college campuses which poignantly suggests an opportunity for change. Single-parent students (n = 12) described angst as they balanced their roles and responsibilities between single-parent and student. Meg stated,…