Within the last few years, American schools have moved toward routinely measuring the outcomes of their educational programs. Two national associations dealing with community colleges have also developed quantitative indicators to assess outcomes for two-year colleges. There are still colleges that make only minimal efforts at assessment, citing the fairly primitive level of assessment technologies and the difficulty in selecting qualitative indicators of effectiveness, but gains have been made nevertheless. For example, the League for Innovation in the Community College has described 5 major missions of the community college (i.e., transfer, career preparation, basic skills, continuing education and community service, and access) and suggested operational definitions, questions to be answered, and data sources. The League suggests assessing the transfer mission, for example, by variously measuring student knowledge, the college's transfer rate, grades that students earn after transfer, and the number of college credits the universities accepted. Other assessment methods currently in use include surveys of: (1) students who have recently graduated, dropped out, or transferred; (2) student performance after transfer; (3) occupational education outcomes; (4) pre- and post-measures of student learning; and (5) public-image studies to determine community members' impressions of a college and students' level of satisfaction. (KP)