Objective: To examine the discursive strategies deployed by community colleges to sustain legitimacy in an evolving and contradictory institutional environment. Method: Using corpus linguistics software, I compared 1,009 mission statements from 2012-2013 with a reference corpus of 427 mission statements from 2004. Results: Keywords analysis, collocation analysis, and concordance analysis suggest that mission statements have changed along four discourse trajectories: credentialing structures, pedagogies, practices, and curriculum goals. Contributions: These findings situate the community college as a point of entry into understanding the relations among institutional legitimacy and a changing cultural, political, and economic milieu.