The skills that culinary school graduates gain from the curriculum do not align with the culinary industry requirements for their first position. This problem, if not addressed, will lead to lower enrollment of students and a limited number of employed culinary arts graduates in California. This basic qualitative study aimed to explore California…

Community colleges play a key role in driving talent development in the United States, producing workers with the kinds of training that employers need while enhancing economic mobility for students. There has been a push among policymakers at the federal and state levels to hold community colleges accountable for the employment outcomes of their…

Online teaching is growing in popularity. This paper presents a case study for an online business course investigating student exam scores obtained from non-randomized and randomized exams. We find that the non-randomized exam scores of the students are suspicious because there are statistically significant disparities from the randomized exam…

Educational approaches in structural engineering have focused on classical methods for solving problems with manual calculations through assignments, quizzes, and exams. The use of computational software to apply the learned knowledge has been ignored for decades. This paper describes an educational approach to tackle the lack of applicable…

Career education programs in California's community colleges are a critical component of public higher education in the state. Also known as career technical or vocational programs, career education trains individuals for middle-skill jobs that require more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year degree. These jobs make up a third of…

We present a longitudinal study of what graduates take away from a cross-disciplinary graduate-level New Product Development (NPD) course at UC Berkeley over a 15-year period from 1996-2010. We designed and deployed a longitudinal survey and interviewed a segment of our NPD alumni population to better understand how well our course prepared these…

The most important components of an academic institution are the educational programs it offers. California Education Code and accreditation standards emphasize the essential nature of a college's educational programs to that college's existence, and often a college's programs reflect the individual personality of the college and the uniqueness of…

The Certification Data Exchange Project (CDEP) was launched in 2012 to provide a model for sharing industry-recognized credential attainment data. Increasingly, employers and education leaders are recognizing the value of industry credentials to verify the knowledge, skills and abilities that students bring to the workforce. As states take steps…

The Economic and Workforce Development Program (EWD) aims to support California's economy by aligning community college educational programs with workforce development needs. The program connects employers and community college educators through a network of workforce training resources and partnerships called "Doing What Matters for Jobs and…

California's dynamic economy depends on having a large and skilled workforce; consequently, the state must continually support and refine efforts to provide workers with employer-valued competencies. Given the wide range of regional and state needs across this vast state, ensuring that the workforce has the training to keep up with labor market…

Scholars in rhetoric and composition have questioned to what extent the field can be decolonial because of the gatekeeping role that writing plays in the university. This article examines the decolonial potential of implementing multilingual practices in first-year composition (fyc), enacting what Walter Mignolo calls "epistemic…

Making classes larger saves money--and public universities across the country have found it a useful strategy to balance their budgets after decades of state funding cuts and increases to infrastructure costs. Where this author teaches, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University, Northridge (CSUN),…

The battle over public access to federally financed research is heating up again. The basic question is this: When taxpayers help pay for scholarly research, should those taxpayers get to see the results in the form of free access to the resulting journal articles? Actions in Washington this month highlight how far from settled the question is,…

The California Community Colleges Workforce and Economic Development program (WED program) helps students, incumbent workers, business partners and industries develop skilled competencies in critical industry sectors. As a source for developing and implementing training and curriculum, the WED program is instrumental in helping the community…

Workforce development represents a central priority in a comprehensive effort to create wealth, industry thickening, and broad-based prosperity. From the onset of the Great Recession in 2007, the Sacramento Region experienced anemic economic growth and remained behind the nation in job creation. Contextualized in the aftermath of the economic…