Objective/Research Question: This paper reports on data collected in a multi-year National Science Foundation grant project involving a professional development (PD) model built to support community college faculty as change agents (CAs). The research question was: How do disciplinary communities of practice (CoP) emerge among community college…

There are numerous widely recognized advantages to pursuing post-secondary education. Yet colleges offer students different resources and educational experiences, which may introduce inequality in the returns to college enrollment. This dissertation uses nationally representative data from the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS:2002) and the 1997…

College students who are parents or caregivers of dependent children make up more than one in five U.S. undergraduates. Colleges need basic information about the experiences and outcomes of the student parents they serve, since these students face distinct challenges, including high rates of economic insecurity and significant time and caregiving…

For 25 years, nearly 3,000 colleges and universities have used the Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL) Satisfaction-Priorities Surveys to assess their students, strengthen the student experience, increase student success and completion, and prioritize campus planning initiatives. The surveys are valued so highly because they reveal where institutions are…

Each year hundreds of institutions will administer national surveys to measure the engagement of their students. However, stakeholders on college campuses, such as educators (faculty, instructors, student affairs educators, and disability services administrators) and institutional research staff who work with this information are often unaware of…

Educational attainment is associated with voting and political trust, but less is known about whether voting and political trust are associated with subsequently higher educational attainment. In a sample of voting-age two-year college students in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent and Adult Health (n= 1212), this study identified three…

Assessment, accountability, and transparency represent a greater focus than ever in higher education. Community colleges are not exempt from these requirements, though they are overlooked in the creation of state and national assessment instruments. Therefore, we designed and distributed the Perceptions of Community College Assessment (PCCA)…

The traditional mission of community colleges is rooted in the provision of sub-baccalaureate education at a low price, but a total of 19 states have changed their legislative policies and currently allow community colleges to offer community college baccalaureate (CCB) degree programs. This study examines the impact of CCB adoption on the tuition…

This chapter describes the findings from a national survey of community college faculty. With the lens of Boyer's Domains of Scholarship applied to these findings, a more fine-grained and accurate assessment of the engagement of community college faculty members in scholarship emerges.

In this chapter, we discuss changes in the age structure of the labor force, the need for continued skill upgrading over the life course to remain employable, patterns of participation in adult learning and development activities, and the role community colleges play in providing education and training to middle-aged and older adults. In an…

Student engagement with faculty has received increased attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, much of the focus has been on the engagement experiences of students enrolled at four-year institutions, often excluding the experiences of Latinx1 students enrolled at two-year public institutions. The present study centers faculty,…

School safety has been widely studied from the perspectives of administrators, teachers, and students in traditional education settings. However, parents' perceptions of school safety have been largely overlooked. Moreover, it is unknown how homeschool parents conceptualize safety in educational settings despite school safety being a known…

This study used descriptive statistics to complicate the national narrative of Latina/o/x student college-going trends and aims to provide directions for future research on Latina/o/x students in the community college. Taking a state-by-state perspective, this study examined whether Latina/o/x college students enrolled in community colleges at…

The purpose of this research was to investigate characteristics of students in the Complete College America (CCA) cohort at a rural Western community college and the relationship of those characteristics with the students' perception of success. Student graduation and success rates are low at community colleges, nationwide. CCA is actively working…

The purpose of this sequential explanatory mixed methods study situated at a large community college in the midwestern United States was to examine faculty attitudes, knowledge, and use of open educational resources (OER) and to identify institutional initiatives that would support OER adoption. The goal of the first, quantitative phase of this…