Postsecondary workforce development is one of the major innovations of the modern community college. In a workforce approach, curriculum is driven by the needs of local industry, course delivery systems are sufficiently flexible to meet the diverse needs of students and industry, and students experience a mixture of work-based and classroom…

This chapter provides a rationale for the value of a liberal arts education, addressing briefly the recent history of the liberal arts, explaining the value of the liberal arts in diverse educational settings as opposed to simply residential liberal arts colleges, and exploring a contemporary rationale for the liberal arts.

For more than 20 years, distance education has provided an option for prospective special education teachers to achieve licensure and a graduate degree. The program began as a two-way interactive television endeavor located at area community college sites. Over time, the program evolved to include online coursework with synchronous class meetings.…

The variety of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives that an ethnically diverse faculty provides a community college give it the capacity to support the complex work that community colleges undertake. The challenges in having a diverse faculty require recruiting diverse applicants and in retaining those applicants once hired. Achieving these…

Many organizations from legislative bodies to advocacy groups to research centers have recently "discovered" developmental education in much the same way as Columbus discovered America. In the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, private philanthropic organizations, initially led by the Lumina Foundation (n.d.), promoted a…

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is a nonprofit, operating foundation with a long tradition of developing and studying ways to improve teaching practice. For the past three years, the Carnegie Foundation has initiated three different Networked Improvement Communities (NICs). The first, Quantway, is addressing the high…

Since 1971, scholarship on community college global counterparts has documented the nuances of these institutions and charted their similarities to one another. The purpose of this article is to detail the first three decades of community college global-counterpart scholarship from 1971-2001. Within each decade there exists scholarship that…

Community colleges have traditionally responded to the financial needs of their students by removing or minimizing financial barriers to attending. Efforts to make community college tuition free fit with this philosophy, but where efforts to minimize or remove financial barriers to attending community college fall short is in empowering students…

This publication provides governmental and higher education decision-makers a statewide perspective of Arkansas public higher education finance for the 2017-19 biennium, as well as trends for the past several years. It also contains a detailed financial profile of each institution and presents a basis for comparative assessments of revenue sources…

In 2014, California policymakers passed the Student Equity Plans (SEP) policy to address disparities in the community college system. The reform effort formalized a campus-wide planning effort that required institutions to examine their data for disparities, develop goals and strategies to mitigate identified inequities, and use new fiscal…

This chapter outlines the birth and growth of a veterans' program in Salt Lake City, Utah, and discusses next steps in spurring additional innovations and advancements to improve service for student veterans in community colleges.

Following World War II, North Carolina created public junior colleges and industrial education centers to meet the educational demands of veterans and expand the technical skills of the state's workforce. Despite the creation of these campuses, in the early 1960s North Carolina ranked 47th in the number of citizens in college, and 66 counties in…

This piece presents a theoretical exploration of the potential for the creation of policy that would inform the inclusion of arts and particularly theater courses in all community colleges. In April 2017, Fong et al. released a comprehensive meta-analysis that explored the relationship between psychosocial factors of self-perception and motivation…

This paper traces the origins and development of coal mining education and training in Britain from 1900 to the 1970s, by which time the coal industry had substantially declined. It looks at the progress from working-class self-help to national policy in support of education and training. The research makes use of college prospectuses and…

The vitality of the innovation economy in the United States depends on the availability of a highly educated technical workforce. A key component of this workforce consists of engineers, engineering technicians, and engineering technologists. However, unlike the much better-known field of engineering, engineering technology (ET) is unfamiliar to…