Free community college programs garnered a lot of headlines last year. Missouri is already offering its program, and Tennessee and Chicago will kick off programs this fall. Free community college tuition is the kind of ambitious reform that resonates with the public. And at the College Opportunity Day of Action this past December, the White […]
Advocacy and Funding Articles
3 Ways to Increase Private Funding
As at other community colleges, financial support for many students at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, N.Y., means more than just covering tuition. “We had a student walking two hours a day because he couldn’t afford the $120 for a MetroCard,” says LaGuardia President Gail Mellow. “Our students are holding down two or […]
4 Tips to Increase Donor Contributions
Tony Zeiss could see the writing on the wall. In 2006, the state and federal governments covered 69 percent of the costs to operate North Carolina’s Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC). Today, that number is 40 percent. “I could tell that we were going to have to be more involved in entrepreneurial enterprises,” Zeiss says. […]
College System Sells Voters on Bond Measure Redo
Bond measures provide crucial funding for community colleges, but voters aren’t always motivated to pass them. A bond to upgrade facilities across the Lone Star Community College System (LSCS) didn’t succeed in May 2013, but with a focus on the system’s role as a catalyst for workforce development, its leader hopes that the second time […]
VFA: An Accountability Framework for Community Colleges
In the quest to improve higher education completion rates, there is broad consensus, both in Washington and on the nation’s two- and four-year college campuses, that educators must do a better job of measuring student and institutional progress. College leaders need to clearly assess whether students are achieving the educational goals they set for themselves, […]
5 Tips for Winning a TAACCCT Grant
In the four-plus years since President Obama signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, few programs have had a deeper, more pervasive impact on the nation’s community college campuses than the $2 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program. Administered by the U.S. Department of Labor, the program has […]
Ready to Succeed: Helping Families Pay for College
College can open the door to higher salaries later in life, but what about the financial hurdles students face while still enrolled? Sometimes scholarships, grants and loans just aren’t enough to meet the increasing financial burden a higher education places on students. Lawmakers in Pennsylvania are the latest to consider alternative tuition measures for middle- […]
A Better Way to Pay for Free College?
It never hurts to ask. That’s at least part of the message coming out of Michigan, where administrators for the Grand Rapids Community College Foundation have raised more than $26.5 million in gifts and awards in little more than three years — all part of a special fund that will pay for the area’s disadvantaged […]
Five Years In: Evaluating President Obama’s Graduation Challenge
My, how time flies. It’s been five years since President Obama challenged the nation’s community college leaders to help America again become the No. 1 producer of college graduates in the world. Since then, business and education leaders attended the first-ever White House Summit on Community Colleges; benefitted from a revolutionary new grant program from […]
Mich.: Pay for Tuition with Future Earnings?
Programs that would offer community college students access to free tuition are all the rage. In the past few months, lawmakers in several states — Mississippi and Tennessee, to name two — have floated ambitious proposals that would essentially enable high school graduates to attend the first two years of community college for free. Last […]