Early college participation is soaring in the state of Maine: Over the past five years, the number of high school enrollees in Maine’s community colleges report has increased by 71 percent. “We see a lot of increased activity throughout our dual-enrollment efforts,” says Mercedes Pour, who oversees early college programs for the Maine Community College […]

Editor’s Note: This is the first article in a two-part series about successful programs expanding in The City University of New York community college system. When Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) was introduced to 1,100 students at The City University of New York (CUNY) in 2007, the goal was to improve retention and outcome […]

It was a partnership between high school and higher-education administrators that launched Illinois’ Joliet Junior College (JCC), the nation’s oldest community college, in 1901. J. Stanley Brown, superintendent of Joliet Township High School, and William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, founded JJC as an experimental postgraduate high school program; for its first […]

Not long ago, community leaders in Greeley, Colorado, were worried: High school students were scoring below average on state exams, and the dropout rate was high. Greely-Evans school district serves more than 21,000 students, with almost 10,000 in 10 different high schools, says Geri Anderson, special assistant to the president for external affairs at Aims […]

ACT recently released two sobering reports showing that many low-income and black students are failing to meet college-readiness benchmarks. Most of these students say they want to go to college but are not prepared academically to succeed. College-readiness gaps in these groups emerge at an earlier age, compared with the general population. ACT recommendations include […]

For the past few years, Seattle Central College (SCC) has offered degree-seeking students a statistics course as an alternative to the traditional pre-college math sequence. Statway, an innovative curriculum developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and used by 31 community colleges nationwide, allows students to start taking college-level math quicker. SCC’s […]

Both North Carolina and Virginia have committed to statewide reform of developmental education in their community college systems. These two states are participating in an ongoing study by the Community College Research Center, within Teachers College at Columbia University, to explore the effects of these redesign initiatives. To learn more about this reform and its […]

For nearly a decade, community college administrators across the country have been taking a long, hard look at traditional developmental education models. Their question: Are they effective in propelling students toward completion? In several states, including Tennessee, bold new initiatives are being put into place, with promising results. The challenge Not long ago, when test […]

To help combat the ever-increasing number of high school graduates needing to take developmental courses in college, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) decided to take matters into its own hands. “If you look at ACT Readiness benchmarks, 44 percent of students meet the benchmark in math, and 43 percent meet it for reading. So […]

At Howard Community College (HCC), in Columbia, Maryland, administrators have been taking a different approach to entrance and placement requirements for students who are close but not quite ready for college-level courses. For several years, the school has made the English Accelerated Learning Program available to new students who fall short of the reading or […]