For varying lengths of time, community colleges have been working to market their summer course offerings to university students who are looking to pick up extra credits at a lower cost. Some students already have associate degrees from those same schools and are returning “home,” so to speak, while others simply grew up in a […]
Completion Articles
Unfinished Business: ‘Our next frontier’
Community colleges have excelled at providing students with access to higher education, and over the past several years have improved in helping their students succeed. But one area that remains a challenge for all higher education, including two-year colleges, is equity. “We still are woefully inadequate in this area,” Walter Bumphus, president and CEO of […]
Bound for greatness
It was the summer of 2014, and Yolanda Johnson was worried. The executive officer for student services for Springfield Public Schools, Johnson fretted about a subsection of her high school student body that weren’t continuing on to college — but could. “I was concerned about district data around our males, particularly males of color, those […]
Partnerships to address students’ life challenges
Community colleges rarely, if ever, attend conferences about housing and food insecurity. It’s about time they do in order to foster partnerships to help the increasing number of students on campus who face such challenges. Mark Mitsui, president of Oregon’s Portland Community College (PCC), pitched that idea during a session on leveraging resources to transform […]
Report roundup
Here are three reports you should know about this month. Community college students agree that having a positive “mindset” does help in succeeding in college, but their confidence tends to freeze during testing and math. That’s according to a report by the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas, which examines […]
Making data accessible
Many colleges have concerns about publishing the good, the bad, and the ugly data related to student success. MiraCosta College asked, “What would happen if virtually all data was accessible to the entire campus community?” During MiraCosta College’s redesign of the student experience through the application of the Pathway’s model, the college engaged in a […]
Boosting completions of single mothers
The national nonprofit Education Design Lab has selected four community colleges — Central New Mexico Community College, Delgado Community College (Louisiana), Monroe Community College (New York) and Ivy Tech Community College (Indiana) — to test and scale strategies to improve completion rates of single mothers by 30 percent at each college by 2024. “A college […]
SHOUTS shout-out
People often twist themselves silly trying to invent clever acronyms that are both readable and descriptive. SHOUTS is a winner, an acronym that works as a powerful verb and an apt summary of the organization it represents – Students Helping Out Students. This new mentoring group comprises students from two distinct but related Holyoke Community […]
Remedial ed reform takes root
In March, the California Community Colleges Board of Governors took a leap toward ending remedial education. The board unanimously adopted regulatory changes designed to keep students from inaccurately being placed into remedial courses that add time to completion and create other roadblocks to success. The regulatory changes establish requirements for colleges to fully comply with […]
Tackling the price of textbooks
Last year, less than half of Onondaga Community College’s students were able to buy their textbooks. For a full-time student, the cost of textbooks was, on average, $615 a semester. Now, the New York college and Barnes & Noble College (BNC), the operator of OCC’s campus bookstore, are cutting costs with the Box of Books […]