This chapter describes a strong partnership with a long history between Rochester Community and Technical College (RCTC) and Winona State University (WSU), and focuses on the advising process utilized by a shared advisor employed by both institutions that has resulted in an improved transfer experience for students.

Community college completion has been proven to be a ticket to a middle-class life. Moreover, we know that poverty causes educational barriers, including community college completion. Community colleges across the nation are identifying significant equity gaps between students from poor versus middle-class or affluent households. One solution to…

This guide presents what Minnesota has to offer for higher education. With two-year and four-year public and private institutions as well as accredited cosmetology and specialized trade schools, the profiles found in the beginning of the guide get right to the facts on tuition, fees, class sizes and required exams. The program grid, found in the…

Within University of Minnesota Extension's health and nutrition program area, we created and are using a decision-making tree to prioritize our work with communities of color through equitable decision-making practices. The tool is currently used to help grant administrators winnow down a pool of applicants for a participatory grant-making program…

This article provides a preliminary report on the construct validity and internal consistency of the "Community Scale." The "Community Scale" was developed to acknowledge the perceptions of community members and to promote a student-led "School Community Partnership Process" within the larger context of school climate…

While most community colleges admit all students who apply for admission, the vast majority have required students to demonstrate specified levels of literacy and numeracy before they can take college-level courses. Typically, students have been assessed using a single placement test, such as the College Board's ACCUPLACER. Colleges--or sometimes…

University-community partnerships (UCPs) are increasingly utilized to address issues in education. In this article, we present reflections on best practices for child- and family-focused UCPs. These reflections emerged before, during, and after a convening that brought together representatives from five UCPs in the United States that emphasized…

This report presents an approach to evaluating networked improvement communities (NICs) and describes the tools used to apply the approach to a formative evaluation of the Minnesota Alternative Learning Center Networked Improvement Community (Minnesota ALC NIC). In fall 2019 leaders at the Minnesota Department of Education requested support from…

This paper presents the results of participatory action research survey responses from doctoral students regarding strategic onboarding activities. Twelve first-year doctoral students in an inaugural doctoral program cohort responded to Likert Scale and open-ended questions during the first week of a two-week on-campus residency. Resulting student…

The purpose of this article is to highlight one unique program at a university in the upper midwest and how its PETE program formed a partnership with the homeschool community in the area. Seven key steps are outlined within this article for considering a partnership between a PETE program and the homeschool community: (1) assessing the community,…

The EPICS Program was created in 1995 with the dual purposes of improving engineering education and addressing compelling needs within our communities. The model broke with many traditional academic traditions, involving students in multidisciplinary teams of students from first-year to fourth years for multiple semesters or even years on projects…

In this paper, we address the achievements to date and the learnings from the development and ten-year implementation of the Iron Range Engineering (IRE) program while articulating its future directions. IRE uses research-based instructional strategies to implement a project-based learning (PBL) curriculum where authentic design sits at the heart…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine (1) the relationship between teachers' perceived cultural competence and the perceived implementation of culturally responsive Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) practices, conditional on teachers' race, and (2) the relationship between teachers' perceived implementation of culturally responsive…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of receiving an associate's degree via reverse credit transfer on retention and bachelor's degree attainment for students in Hawaii and Minnesota who transferred from a community college to a university before earning an associate's degree. Results showed mostly positive evidence with some…

The CAEL (Council for Adult and Experiential Learning) and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) announce the inaugural winners of the Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) Equity Awards, recognizing strategies that have been proven to put CPL in reach of key adult learner populations and/or increase their CPL credit-earning.…