This article summarizes the work of the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC) in assisting community colleges through cost savings programs, collaborative programmatic initiatives, and research to inform policy and improve practice--including recent efforts to develop valid and reliable methods of measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of individual institutions. As an alternative to using raw graduation rates, MHEC has proposed using a value-added indicator of effectiveness defined as the difference between an institution's actual and predicted student success rate, given relatively fixed structural, contextual, and demographic attributes. Similarly, instead of using credentials awarded per expenditure, an adjusted measure of institutional efficiency is proposed: it compares actual educational expenditures with the level of expenditures predicted from the types and disciplines of credentials conferred, faculty attributes, and urbanicity. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential negative effects of academic workforce casualization on community colleges.