Primary research questions: What stories do student parents at Maryland Community College (MCC) tell about their intersecting identities? How do student parents speak about the institutional context of MCC in these stories? What are the implications of these stories in supporting student parents at MCC? Nearly 3.8 million student parents are…

According to the authors, to infuse equity truly in assessment requires that students be actively involved in the process of assessing their own learning. Equitable assessment argues that students can demonstrate attainment of learning outcomes in many ways, and in any particular instance of assessment, students can be offered multiple ways to…

Life roles of nontraditional college students impact their retention and degree completion. Based on the literature, it was not known how nontraditional students describe how their life roles influence their experiences while they complete a 2-year associate degree from a 2-year college in the southern United States. The purpose of this…

This qualitative narrative study aimed to explore the impact of the tutor-student relationship on students' perceptions of belonging in community colleges. This study employed a qualitative narrative approach to understand a distinct phenomenon: the influence of the student-tutor relationship on the sense of belonging among community college…

Twenty-two percent of United States undergraduate students are parents (Cruse, et al., 2020). Referred to as student-parents, they are most likely to have low-incomes and attend community colleges (Cruse, et al., 2019; Gault et al., 2014). They tend to reduce their course loads and drop out of college due to work-life balance challenges even…

The coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic upended the academic trajectories and opportunities of many community college students in the United States. While four-year universities have seen an uptick in applications in the 2021-2022 academic year, community colleges have experienced a sharp decrease in enrollment, signifying significant…

Chemistry students at community colleges often experience a lack of hands-on research opportunities, which can be a significant disadvantage when they transition to four-year universities. To address this, the Summer Chemistry Research Opportunities for Community College Students (SCROCCS) was established in 2022 by graduate students at the…

This study examines how administrative burden is evolving in college classrooms to meet external pressures focused on student success. Through a mixed methods analysis of data from a 2018 survey, this work tests how faculty and administrators view ownership of the responsibility to meet these mandates and whether it is affecting classroom…

This book provides concrete examples of humanizing collectivist critical pedagogy, which creates a learning space with students, values their mutual-agency, and invites them to play a leading role in remaking higher education. It redefines student success to include an understanding of positionality, macro social structures, and agency. Each class…

This Postsecondary Teaching with Technology Collaborative (the Collaborative) report examines how faculty and staff at seven community colleges and two broad-access universities reconsidered students' online learning needs in the midst of the pandemic. The report focuses on a set of interconnected student mindsets and competencies that the authors…

Each year, the Rennie Center collects a set of key indicators in the Data Dashboard to provide context on the status of education in the Commonwealth. This data is collected from the MA Department of Early Education and Care; MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education; MA Department of Higher Education; U.S. Census Bureau; U.S. Department…