The level of success that has sustained community colleges in the past will not suffice for the future. Shifting environments, resources, competitors, accountability, and technology have changed the measures of organizational performance. This article provides a new framework and defines a new set of critical measures that will move community…

Differences between researchers and practitioners can be found in four areas: the distance from the object of study; the ideological perspective; the purposes of the research; and the political agenda behind the research. Each of these principles dominates the perceptions of the people involved and thus contributes to the phenomenon of mutual…

This study explores the demographic, personal, and professional characteristics of honors and developmental faculty in community colleges. The authors uncover significant racial and ethnic patterns and arrive at a preliminary typology of those who teach at the upper and lower margins of the two-year college curriculum.

Community college students who transfer to universities face innumerable challenges. While documented in the American literature on transfer, there has been relatively little published research on transfer in Canada. This paper explores the experience of nursing students transferring from three community colleges to a large urban university in…

This review examines the impact of Asian Pacific American (APA) students' characteristics and experiences on their academic achievement. The article begins by describing the demographics and diversity of this group, and it explores the challenges posed by APA community college students' background characteristics and influences, the model minority…

This study addresses the career advancement of community college administrators, with particular attention to the relationships between gender, human capital, and promotion. The findings indicate that both women and men administrators made similar investments in human capital and were equally likely to be promoted during a two-year period.…

Dramatic changes in the nature of work and its organization emphasize the need for workers to address complex and ill-structured problems and to produce knowledge useful in the workplace. Integrated use of computer-based technologies in education-for-work and workplace learning programs can address this need. Such potential, however, depends on…

Since 1988, the Association of California Community College Administrators (ACCCA) has sponsored a statewide mentor program intended to prepare junior-level administrators for senior positions and to create a more diverse pool from which future college leaders can be drawn. This article is an initial report of this program. As the report…

This review explores the context in which performance indicators and performance-based funding in community colleges have emerged as a means of measuring institutional effectiveness in community colleges. The article presents the history and context for performance indicators in community colleges and discusses the benefits and drawbacks of the…

The goal of this study is to explore and compare the experiences and views that community college students face across multiple levels of parental education. The findings demonstrate significant differences across five different parental education levels, arguing that future research ought to expand current notions of parental education beyond a…

To explore professionalization of community college faculty, this study uses data from case studies of searches for full-time arts and sciences community college faculty. The author concludes that there is little evidence of a unique profession and that on a continuum of professionalization community college faculty are more professionalized than…

This research explored the issues of access to the internet and use of the web for instructional purposes between full-time and part-time community college faculty. The findings that 40% of part-time faculty do not have Internet access at work would seem to indicate that part-time faculty are poorly integrated into the technology infrastructure of…

This review discusses the concept of the two-year college as a separate discourse community within the larger discourse community of higher education. The article offers a complete definition and description of discourse communities and discusses a new understanding of scholarship in terms of the scholarship of teaching. The review argues that…

This study examined the relationships between first semester participation in a community college developmental writing course and short and longterm academic performance. The study examined whether developmental writing course participants earned higher grades at higher rates at the end of a 3-year period following initial college enrollment when…

To determine what attracts faculty to rural community colleges, a qualitative study, based on the theory of met expectations, was conducted. The faculty who expressed satisfaction were those who were comfortable living and working in a rural community, enjoyed the challenge of teaching students who varied considerably in their readiness for…