Background/Context: Community colleges are positioned as a cost-effective way for students to complete the first two years of a bachelor's degree, yet informational barriers to the transfer process are well documented. To transfer, students must overcome informational constraints, navigate bureaucratic hurdles, and resolve conflicting requirements…

Mentoring is a high-impact strategy for supporting student success and is particularly important for rural community college students, who often face heightened structural and systemic inequities, highlighting the need for mentorship approaches tailored to their unique needs and strengths. This data note analyzes the descriptions of 587 mentorship…

The authors of this study utilized data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement to conduct a critical examination of perceptions of institutional support among transfer-seeking community college students in North Carolina. We adopted an intersectional quantitative approach by centering racial and ethnic identity, and examining the…

Racially minoritized students (RMS) face substantial disparities in college persistence and completion rates (Museus & Saelua, 2017). In particular, Black student enrollment at public two-year or community colleges has declined significantly, dipping below 13% in 2020, while for-profit institutions have maintained enrollment of Black students…

Assembly Bill 1705 (AB 1705) seeks to strengthen students' completion of the first STEM Calculus course for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programs across the California Community Colleges. The law sets new standards for students' placement and first math enrollment to ensure STEM students begin in transfer-level coursework that…

California community colleges are undergoing massive systemwide policy reform with the goal of transformational change that increases student success. Their open-access nature makes them the most accessible higher education system for historically underserved communities. As a result, community colleges serve as a gateway to higher education for…

This mixed method study was conducted to gain a better understanding of technical educational center (TEC) cohort programs at a midwestern urban community college. In a cohort model, the students start a program and progress through the curriculum together until completion (Bista & Cox, 2014). Specifically, the study focused on two student…

Active learning strategies are a popular method in current classrooms and educational research. As diversity in the United States population, and likewise in the post-secondary classroom, continues to increase, educational studies should be reporting results in terms of student diversity. Many studies instead report active learning strategy…

Research has shown that modern courses and programs designed to foster critical thinking vary in both content and delivery, in turn leading to differences in their effectiveness. Few studies have investigated critical thinking among nontraditional students at community colleges taking STEM courses, especially within the geosciences. Furthermore,…

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…

Community colleges expect their employees to promote academic success and propel students to graduation by providing a range of services, including academic advising. Increasingly, advising professionals continue to extoll the benefits of effective academic advising. The problem of the lack of enough trained advisers and information about the…

This qualitative study examined the student leadership experiences of seven Latina community college students and how they made sense of how those experiences impacted their academic success. It used the psychosociocultural framework (J. Castellanos & Gloria, 2007; Gloria & Rodriguez, 2000) as its theoretical lens. Interpretative…

Across Tennessee, more than 595,000 working-age adults have earned college credit but do not have a postsecondary credential. In response to the growing economic demands over the past decade, many states launched efforts to re-engage students with some college but no degree (SCND). In 2018, Tennessee launched "Tennessee Reconnect," a…

The purpose of this study is to explore the "behaviors" that students who have graduated employ and the "environmental elements/interventions" that helped students graduate from community colleges in Connecticut (CT). This study's aim was to construct new knowledge about community college nontraditional student persistence and…

Understanding what helped adult learners stay motivated to overcome their obstacles and complete their technical programs is important if Ohio wants to meet its goal of 65% of their workforce possessing an industry-recognized credential or degree. This qualitative study asks six recent adult learner graduates to reflect on their experiences in…