For some high school students, the decision to continue on to higher education depends on whether they can find a job after their high school graduation. So when the economy improved in Evansville, Ind., Ivy Tech Community College saw enrollment decrease. Ivy Tech wasn’t the only higher education institution to experience this enrollment drop. Over one-third of Indiana’s […]

For many high school seniors, the idea of college is intriguing leads to lots of questions. What are college classes like? Am I prepared? How much is tuition, and what other expenses will I have? What if I can’t afford these costs on my own? For the last three years, Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS) […]

Seven years ago, administrators at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) felt their developmental English courses were going pretty smoothly. The National Association for Developmental Education had recently certified the college’s remedial English program, which had a course pass rate averaging a respectable 60 percent. But a couple of people in the department noticed […]

You know about registration — that familiar time when students jockey for course sections right before classes begin. But have you heard of Extreme Registration? The concept, pioneered by administrators at State Center Community College District, in California, leverages the busy registration period to connect students with more than just classes. In addition to traditional […]

Community college leaders know that the success of an innovative partnership depends on several factors: common goals, benefits to all parties, open communication, passionate champions on both sides — and, yes, even a little faith in one another. At least that’s been the lesson from the pilot year of Harrisburg Area Community College’s (HACC) Early […]

Community colleges are in a fruitful and exciting period of developmental education reform. While it is heartening to see so much activity in this area, I am concerned that policymakers, as well as college leaders, administrators and faculty, continue to view remediation as a separate and isolated activity, rather than as a process that can […]

Looking to improve completion rates and reduce the need for remedial education, the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) is testing a new approach to math placement. Called the Virginia Placement Test-Math (VPT), the assessment essentially aims to place students in developmental or college-level math courses after evaluating specific performance metrics tied to a chosen field […]

To improve college success rates, sometimes the best place for administrators to start is at the bottom. The thinking is simple: Your highest-performing, most motivated students are going to complete, no matter what. But the struggling ones, those who set foot on campus with little or no direction and poor placement scores to boot, run […]