This report offers a series of transcript-based portraits of traditional-age community college students. As of 2001, students under the age of 22 constituted 42 percent of all credit-seeking students in community colleges and those under the age of 24 constituted nearly three-fourths of first-time community college students. As the baby-boom echo continues to play out with larger high school graduating classes, and as national and state policies focus even more intensely on the intersection between secondary and postsecondary education, this group is of increasing importance to community colleges. The three portraits offered here are designed to help community college administrators and faculty, along with state higher education officers, in developing responsive indicators of institutional performance. They may also prove useful to researchers in refining and refreshing the questions they ask and the variables they employ when exploring similar terrain. To provide the portraits, this data essay draws principally on the most recently completed of the grade-cohort longitudinal studies of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88/2000), which began with a national sample of 25,000 eighth-graders in U.S. schools in 1988 and followed subgroups of this cohort to 2000. The postsecondary transcripts for 8,900 members of this cohort (representing a weighted 2.2 million students) were gathered in 2000, when most cohort members were 26 or 27 years old, and the story lines of this report are built from the transcript records. Three other NCES data sets are used to produce both comparative and trend data. Two of these are earlier grade-cohort longitudinal studies that also included college transcript data: the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS:72), for which postsecondary transcripts were gathered in 1984, when most of its students were 30 or 31 years old; and the High School and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 1980 high school sophomores (High School and Beyond/Sophomore Cohort), for which postsecondary transcripts were gathered in 1993, when most of its students were 29 or 30 years old. More important is the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study of 1995-96, which followed its sample through 2001. The BPS96/01, as it is called, includes beginning students of all ages, and thus provides critical data justifying the focus of "Moving into Town" on traditional-age students. The following are appended: (1) Principal Features of the NCES Grade-cohort Longitudinal Studies; (2) Technical Issues; (3) Tables on Miscellaneous Topics Raised in the Text; (4) Comparative Course Participation Rates of Community College Students; (5) Financial Aid in the First Year of Attendance: Highlights from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study, 1995/96-2001; (6) First-to-Second Year "Retention" of Community College Students: The Critical Factor of Age at Entry; (7) Occupational Course Credit Clusters Used in the NELS:88/2000 Postsecondary Transcript Files; (8) Occupation Codes Used for The NELS:88/2000 Transcript Files (as Amended); and (9) Congruent Combinations of Field of Study and Occupation, by Degree Level: NELS:88/2000 Longitudinal Study. (Contains 66 footnotes and 59 tables.)