Moving Forward in the 21st Century
By AACC 21st Century Center Staff
July 12, 2016
More than four years after AACC’s groundbreaking Reclaiming the American Dream report, work continues to advance the mission of community colleges and ensure student success.
In 2012, AACC’s 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges released its groundbreaking report, Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future. The report contains seven recommendations for reimagining the community college.
Since then, AACC has worked to help colleges turn those recommendations into accomplishments. We’ve facilitated meetings with community college and K–12 leaders to discuss strategies to increase college readiness. We launched the Pathways Project, which is focused on building capacity for community colleges to design and implement structured academic and career pathways at scale, for all of their students. The Right Signals initiative is looking at universal credentialing, which will result in more students having the required skills and credentials needed to meet employers’ needs. And, as more and more community college presidents retire, AACC continues to grow its suite of leadership programming in order to guarantee that tomorrow’s leaders are prepared today.
We launched the 21st Century Center in 2014 as a repository of resources and promising practices to help institutions implement strategies for redesigning students’ educational experiences, reinventing institutional roles, and resetting the system. Articles and resources fall into six categories: completion, skills gap, advocacy and fundraising, college readiness, leaders and training, and mission and values.
The articles on the site have been a way for us to tell you what’s working in colleges across the country. Now, we want to hear from you: What’s working at your college? What’s not working? What are you still struggling with? What are your priorities?
This new blog is a way for us to not only communicate with you about issues that matter to you, but, through LinkedIn, we’ll also get to continue the conversation. We can’t wait to hear from you!