Opinion

Improve Advising to Help Students Reach Completion

“By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world, and community colleges will produce an additional 5 million graduates.”—President Barack Obama, Building American Skills Through Community Colleges, March 2010 Since President Obama outlined the challenge above, community colleges across the country, as well as the American Association of […]

Leading the Change in Higher Ed

The higher-education landscape is changing, and our community colleges need to do more than adapt — we need to lead. Regulators and subsidizers are pushing to make us more efficient, graduating more people in less time, but we’re doing the same things we always have. That model is not sustainable and will ultimately lead to […]

The Power of Open Educational Resources

As the cost of higher education continues to increase, community colleges are striving to improve affordability for students across the country. When it comes to college costs, people often think of tuition or room and board — but one factor not often discussed is the rising cost of textbooks. Currently, the standard cost of textbooks […]

Youth Apprenticeship Works

Editor’s Note: This commentary originally appeared in Community College Daily. With industrial stalwarts like KOHLER Co., Manitowoc Co., Sargento Foods, Vollrath Co., Johnsonville Sausage, Bemis, Rockline Industries, Lakeside Foods — just to name a few — all located in a 40 mile radius in eastern Wisconsin, solving the national manufacturing skills gap has a decidedly […]

Investing In Students Who Need It Most

Over the past few years, as foundations and the government have placed more emphasis on student success, community colleges have been pushed to invigorate their focus on enrollment and completion rates. This is a positive thing. However, because of the steady depletion of state and federal funds, this focus on rates has been paired with […]

What Minimum Wage Has to Do With Community Colleges

The minimum wage has been at the top of the national conversation lately, with Los Angeles becoming the latest — and largest — city (after Seattle; San Francisco; and Emeryville, California) to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. Well that’s great, you may be thinking, but what does that have to […]

An Opportunity for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

If I told you that the Edmonds Community College campus has two honeybee colonies, would you be able to guess where they fit into the college curriculum? You might guess biology, and you’d be right. But would you also guess art, chemistry, engineering, horticulture and culinary arts? The bees live in our community garden, where […]

The Next Big Things for Student Success: Pathways

This weekend is our 95th Annual Convention, in San Antonio, Texas, and we couldn’t be more excited! We will be talking with more than 2,000 fellow community college leaders about the next big things we can do to advance student success on our campuses. As we gear up for these important conversations, top of mind […]

The Next Big Things: Closing the Skills Gap

AACC’s Annual Convention is starting this weekend, and the top-of-mind question will be, what are the next big things our colleges can do to improve outcomes for our students? Students are concerned about jobs as they enroll in and complete college. How will a community college degree help get students jobs with family-supporting wages that […]

The Next Big Things: Student Support

As we approach AACC’s 95th Annual Convention, in San Antonio, Texas, we have been thinking overtime about the changes community colleges can make to better serve students over the next three, five, even 10 years. We have called these campus-driven changes The Next Big Things, and we’re placing them at the heart of the conversation […]