Accrediting agencies step up requirements for evidence of institutions' efforts to improve student learning. Congressional leaders call for increased accountability and transparency in higher education. Business leaders worry about the growing gaps between their workforce needs and the numbers of Americans actually prepared for the available jobs. As university tuition rises, state leaders from the East to the West Coasts look to community colleges to enroll large numbers of new students looking for affordable alternatives. Despite two decades of intensive work on public school reform, only about 42 percent of the students who complete high school in the United States are ready for college-level studies. Nonetheless, the future viability of communities, states, and the nation depends heavily on raising the overall educational attainment level of citizenry. An alternative view of quality, articulated by George Kuh, director of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), is that quality, at least for undergraduate education, should be defined in terms of the student's educational experience--in particular, the student's active engagement in his or her own learning--at the institution. This approach focuses on which institutional practices and student behaviors research has shown are connected to greater student persistence and learning. It is this view of quality that makes the most sense for America's community colleges. This view and surrounding issues are discussed in the following sections of this article: Assessing Engagement in the Community College; Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice; and Emerging Implications for Quality Improvement.