When the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) released its Implementation Guide: Empowering Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future earlier this year, the goal was simple: create a lasting document that would identify promising practices capable of driving campuswide reforms, from the president’s office to the classroom and beyond. The work of AACC’s nine Implementation […]
Resources
Taking Stock of Your College Fundraising Efforts
Every good community college president — as well as foundation director — wants to amplify the amount of private philanthropic support they can secure to advance the college. How, though, does a CEO measure the foundation’s performance and know what to expect? Benchmarking your fundraising efforts, while essential, is sometimes tricky for community colleges. Your […]
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 […]
Faculty, Your Secret Weapon for Student Retention
As pressure mounts to improve college completion rates, community colleges are increasingly on the lookout for solutions to an age-old problem: how to keep students from dropping out once they enroll. North Carolina Southwest Community College, located at the western tip of the Tar Heel state, is keeping students engaged through a program that relies […]
Making Dual Enrollment Work for Rural Colleges
In the quest to improve college readiness and, ultimately, to boost college completion, few practices have received more attention in recent months than so-called dual-enrollment programs; the arrangements allow students to earn college credits while still in high school. A report released by the National Center for Education Statistics last year (NCES) estimated that as […]
3 Resources to Reclaim the American Dream
When the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) unveiled this site to its members at its 94th Annual Convention in Washington, D.C., back in April, its goal was simple: create a destination where community college leaders could return to share ideas, learn about promising practices and draw inspiration as they continued the hard work of […]
A Crisis of College Readiness
It’s no secret that our institutions face a national crisis of college readiness. Each semester, large numbers of students arrive on our campuses unprepared for the rigors of college-level work. In addition to the financial and emotional burdens that accompany the reality of testing into developmental courses is an uphill struggle to degree completion that […]
Feds Offer $75M for Bright Ideas to Boost College Completion
President Barack Obama has made no secret of his desire to again make America the world’s No. 1 producer of college graduates. He was hardly in office a month when he challenged the nation’s colleges to double the number of college completers by 2020. Since that time, the president has met with higher education leaders […]
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- […]
Student Sexual Assault Resources
Mission and Values > Student Sexual Assault Following more than 4 months of research and analysis of sexual assault cases and effective practices, on April 29, 2014, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault released a report, Not Alone, to provide guidelines and recommendations to protect students from violence and improve how colleges handle […]