Community colleges in America are facing significant challenges that necessitate transformational change. Collaboration is essential to address these challenges within an environment characterized by external stakeholder interdependence, internal stakeholder interdependence through shared governance, and unique power and authority structures.…

Maine's public universities and community colleges have a long tradition of working together. They are doing so now more closely than ever before given the needs of Maine students and employers and the institutions' imperative to achieve efficiencies and savings through partnership. As required by Public Law 2015, Chapter 261, the leaders of both…

Community colleges are institutions that provide access to higher education to anyone with a high school diploma or GED (Kim & Dolan, 2015). The student body is highly diverse and may not be prepared for academic coursework (Cohen et al., 2014). These challenges may be supplemented through embedding services directly into college courses. The…

This article proposes a new way of thinking about shared governance, focusing on the informal and sometimes unintentional interactions among faculty, staff, and even students. We argue that an operational place to start reconceptualizing shared governance is to look at the everyday interactions that collectively make up the hidden experiences of…

The Brazilian Federal Network of VET Institutes was created in 2008 to address the demand for Higher Education's rapid growth. Since the establishment of Science Without Borders in 2011, the Federal Institutes have been developing international strategies for strengthening their internationalization process. However, there has been little research…

In "America's Hidden Economic Engines," editors Robert B. Schwartz and Rachel Lipson spotlight community and technical colleges as institutions uniquely equipped to foster more equitable economic growth across America's regions. As Schwartz and Lipson show, these colleges are the best-placed institutions to reverse the decades-long rise…

Leadership development programs offer the opportunity for an organization to invest within to identify and support the next generation of leaders. Community colleges are complex organizations whose survival depends on competent leaders who can address the organization's business and academic needs. The academia and departmental isolation culture…

While community colleges intend for their students to complete their associate degree before transferring to a university, that is not always the case. Many students transfer when they are only a few course credits short of an associate degree. The study was conducted at a public university in Texas. The option of the reverse transfer process…

A growing body of research has documented extensive credit loss among transfer students. However, the field lacks theoretically driven and empirically supported frameworks that can guide credit loss research and reforms. We develop and then test a comprehensive framework designed to address this gap using novel administrative credit loss data from…

Today, half of all states authorize at least one community college to offer bachelor's degree programs. In the past five years alone, eight states have authorized community colleges to offer baccalaureate programs. Given the momentum behind this movement, we sought to qualitatively explore higher education leaders' perceptions of the role of…

There are many intersections between public and community college libraries, both in the populations they serve and their functions within their local communities. Both types of libraries play a crucial role in supporting the diverse needs of their communities, serving as hubs for education, information, and essential services. Maximizing…

This paper outlines how four community colleges, and a large public university, collaborated to support over 80 paraprofessionals who sought to finish their bachelor's degree and earn licensure. Funding from a statewide "Grow Your Own" initiative allowed the teacher educators at the community colleges and university to put in place…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the relationship between academia and society focusing on how technical universities perform Third Mission (TM) to promote knowledge outside the academic environment producing multiple benefits. Design/methodology/approach: This investigation is performed through the conceptual approach. The theoretical…

Collaborative leadership, a management style in which leaders encourage employees to contribute their own ideas and work together to develop solutions for meeting institutional goals, is becoming more common in community colleges and other organizations. In leveraging the ideas of a broad range of people, collaborative leadership often leads to…

Fostering intraprofessional collaboration (intraPC) between occupational therapy (OT) and occupational therapy assistant (OTA) students is an integral piece of occupational therapy education programs. The Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education (ACOTE) even expanded upon intraPC standards in their 2023 standards version. Despite…