Editor’s note: The American Association of Community Colleges’ (AACC) Annual Convention is underway in San Antonio. This article is part of a series on the Community College Daily by Tabitha Whissemore that profiles nominees of AACC’s 2015 Awards of Excellence. This piece focuses on the four finalists in the category of emerging leadership. Winners in each […]

Santa Fe College, in Gainesville, Florida, is the 2015 recipient of the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. Selected from among thousands of colleges, Santa Fe has a completion rate of 62 percent compared with the national average of 40 percent, and 70 percent of Santa Fe’s students are accepted at the University of Florida, […]

In August, Ric Baser took the helm of Northwest Vista College, one of five community colleges that make up the Alamo Colleges district, in San Antonio, Texas. Baser never intended to be a college president. In fact, he wanted to be an actor. Once a speech and theater major, Baser ended up earning a master’s […]

When a community college president announces plans to retire or move on, the board is charged with what may be the most important responsibility they have: hiring a new educational leader. The basic principles of hiring a new college president haven’t changed much since the 1970s, when the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) was […]

When Bill Seymour took over as president of Tennessee’s Cleveland State Community College, in 2014, he found a campus on warning from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) for deficiencies in the college’s institutional effectiveness. While it had participated in a regional strategic plan for years, the college hadn’t engaged […]

Community colleges are diverse environments, and not just in the student body sense. Each faculty member has his or her own teaching style — and some are more current than others. A few years ago, leaders at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) realized two things: They had faculty members who wanted to learn more about […]

If anyone understands the value of a community college education, it’s Kathleen Hetherington, president of Howard Community College (HCC) in Maryland. A community college graduate herself, Hetherington has devoted her career to community college leadership and has earned her share of accolades, most recently AACC’s 2014 Emerging Leadership Award. Since becoming HCC’s president in 2007, […]

There’s some positive news in the ongoing struggle to recruit and retain quality instructors at the nation’s community colleges: Even with recent funding and budget struggles, new evidence suggests that faculty pay is on the rise. Just how much of a pay bump are we talking about? At 2 percent, it can hardly be considered […]

When the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) released Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future back in 2012, the report forced the nation’s two-year career and technical colleges to face several hard — some might say brutal — truths, from poor graduation rates to a growing skills gap. While community colleges […]

When you got up this morning, did you do your 20-mile march? If you had an opportunity to hear best-selling author and business consultant Jim Collins’ keynote at the 94th annual American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) convention in Washington, D.C., on April 5, you know what I’m talking about. Perhaps best known for penning […]