What Excellent Community Colleges Do

What Excellent Community Colleges Do PDF Author: Joshua S. Wyner
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
ISBN: 1612506518
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In What Excellent Community Colleges Do, Joshua S. Wyner draws on the insights and evidence gained in administering the inaugural Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. This book identifies four domains of excellence—degree completion, equity, student learning, and labor market success—and describes in rich detail the policies and practices that have allowed some community colleges to succeed in these domains. By starting with a holistic definition of excellence, measuring success against that definition, and then identifying practices and policies that align with high levels of student success, the author seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about improving student success in community colleges.

What Excellent Community Colleges Do

What Excellent Community Colleges Do PDF Author: Joshua S. Wyner
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
ISBN: 1612506518
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book

Book Description
In What Excellent Community Colleges Do, Joshua S. Wyner draws on the insights and evidence gained in administering the inaugural Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. This book identifies four domains of excellence—degree completion, equity, student learning, and labor market success—and describes in rich detail the policies and practices that have allowed some community colleges to succeed in these domains. By starting with a holistic definition of excellence, measuring success against that definition, and then identifying practices and policies that align with high levels of student success, the author seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about improving student success in community colleges.

The Costs of Completion

The Costs of Completion PDF Author: Robin G. Isserles
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421442086
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges PDF Author: Thomas R. Bailey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674368282
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Community colleges enroll half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet only 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree in six years. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges explains how two-year colleges can increase their students’ success rate quickly and at less cost, through a program of guided pathways to completion.

13 Ideas That Are Transforming the Community College World

13 Ideas That Are Transforming the Community College World PDF Author: Terry U. O'Banion
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1475844913
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
America’s community colleges are experiencing the most creative and substantive period of transformation in their 118-year history. There has never been so much research, so much support from foundations, and so much commitment from national leaders to reimagine community colleges for today and for the future. 13 Ideas that Are Transforming the Community College World, edited by Terry U. O’Banion, is the seminal work that captures the major ideas faced by community college leaders in this period of transformation. The book includes 23 authors representing 12 national organizations, perhaps the most significant and substantive list of individuals ever to participate in an edited book on the community college. Each author is a nationally-recognized authority on his or her chapter, and all have played major roles as leaders of national organizations.

The American Community College

The American Community College PDF Author: Arthur M. Cohen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875895116
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
This book is about American community colleges, during the period from 1965-1980, and presents a comprehensive study useful for everyone concerned with higher education. It includes data summaries on students, faculty, curriculum, and many other quantifiable dimensions of the institutions. The data, descriptions, and analyses can be used by administrators--to learn about practices that have proved effective; curriculum planners--who anticipated program revision; faculty members--seeking ideas to modify their classes; and trustees and policy makers--for interesting financial and administrative guidelines.

Understanding Community Colleges

Understanding Community Colleges PDF Author: John S. Levin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415881269
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Understanding Community Colleges provides a comprehensive review of the community college landscape--management and governance, finance, student demographics and development, teaching and learning, policy, faculty, and workforce development--and bridges the gap between research and practice. This contributed volume brings together highly respected scholars in the field who rely upon substantial theoretical perspectives--critical theory, social theory, institutional theory, and organizational theory--for a rich and expansive analysis of community colleges. The latest text to publish in the Core Concepts in Higher Education series, this exciting new text fills a gap in the higher education literature available for students enrolled in Higher Education and Community College graduate programs. This text provides students with: A review of salient research related to the community college field. Critical theoretical perspectives underlying current policies. An understanding of how theory links to practice, including focused end-of-chapter discussion questions. A fresh examination of emerging issues and insight into contemporary community college practices and policy.

Social Justice and Community College Education

Social Justice and Community College Education PDF Author: Bryan Reece
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000389634
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This book explores the central role community colleges play in American social justice. The United States has long-standing social and cultural structures that perpetuate inequality along race, ethnicity, and income lines. The primary role of American community colleges is to disrupt these structures on behalf of the students we serve. In this sense, community colleges are called to play a subversive role in contemporary society, but it is a good kind of subversion. Social Justice and Community College Education makes four very important contributions to this conversation: First, the book helps us quantify and understand the size and dimension of the equity gaps in higher education by tracking ten specific student groups from historically underserved communities. Second, the book summarizes best practices research and literature with regard to pedagogy, services, programs, and leadership in community colleges, presenting practical strategies for implementation. Third, through a national survey of community college personnel, the book covers significant new territory in the discussion of work we need to do collaboratively as community colleges. Fourth, this book captures the unique and special mission of American community colleges. Our work is the work of social justice, and we carry this work out in society at a greater volume, with greater intentionality, and through greater expertise than any other sector of higher education. In this arena, community colleges should lead.

The Community College Story

The Community College Story PDF Author: George B. Vaughan
Publisher: Amer. Assn. of Community Col
ISBN: 0871173727
Category : Community colleges
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description


Defending the Community College Equity Agenda

Defending the Community College Equity Agenda PDF Author: Thomas W. Bailey
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801884470
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Publisher description.

Gateway to Opportunity?

Gateway to Opportunity? PDF Author: J. M. Beach
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000980782
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Can the U.S. keep its dominant economic position in the world economy with only 30% of its population holding bachelor’s degrees? If the majority of U.S. citizens lack a higher education, can the U.S. live up to its democratic principles and preserve its political institutions? These questions raise the critical issue of access to higher education, central to which are America’s open-access, low-cost community colleges that enroll around half of all first-time freshmen in the U.S. Can these institutions bridge the gap, and how might they do so? The answer is complicated by multiple missions—gateways to 4-year colleges, providers of occupational education, community services, and workforce development, as well as of basic skills instruction and remediation.To enable today’s administrators and policy makers to understand and contextualize the complexity of the present, this history describes and analyzes the ideological, social, and political motives that led to the creation of community colleges, and that have shaped their subsequent development. In doing so, it fills a large void in our knowledge of these institutions.The “junior college,” later renamed the “community college” in the 1960s and 1970s, was originally designed to limit access to higher education in the name of social efficiency. Subsequently leaders and communities tried to refashion this institution into a tool for increased social mobility, community organization, and regional economic development. Thus, community colleges were born of contradictions, and continue to be an enigma. This history examines the institutionalization process of the community college in the United States, casting light on how this educational institution was formed, for what purposes, and how has it evolved. It uncovers the historically conditioned rules, procedures, rituals, and ideas that ordered and defined the particular educational structure of these colleges; and focuses on the individuals, organizations, ideas, and the larger political economy that contributed to defining the community college’s educational missions, and have enabled or constrained this institution from enacting those missions. He also sets the history in the context of the contemporary debates about access and effectiveness, and traces how these colleges have responded to calls for accountability from the 1970s to the present.Community colleges hold immense promise if they can overcome their historical legacy and be re-institutionalized with unified missions, clear goals of educational success, and adequate financial resources. This book presents the history in all its complexity so that policy makers and practitioners might better understand the constraints of the past in an effort to realize the possibilities of the future.