As the coronavirus forced businesses and colleges to shut down this past spring, several funders responded with grants to help nonprofit organizations dole out aid to those who were affected. Now that the initial shockwave created by the pandemic is over, foundations are shifting their focus. Instead of providing emergency aid, many are now…

This study compared the geographic mobility of community college students with that of students at other institutions of higher education. Using a sample of 7192 students at 39 institutions across the United States (13 community colleges, 14 public 4-year institutions, 12 private 4-year institutions), it employed the method of operationalizing…

State fiscal support for higher education has met sluggish growth recently, a trend that has community college leaders working to meet student needs despite a shrinking resource pool. According to an annual report released in January by Grapevine, state financial aid for higher education increased just 1.6 percent between the 2017 and 2018 fiscal…

Through no fault of our own, higher education and the world writ large were metaphorically without vision and clarity of sight for the initial few months of the COVID-19 global health crisis as we all tried to stand up protocols, processes, and systems to better identify how our institutions could continue forward safely -- supporting both our…

Language pertaining to the disability community has changed significantly over the years. Previous identity-first language has recently been replaced with person-first language. Person-first language places the emphasis on the person, then the disability. This is in contrast to identify-first language, which places the disability before the…

Although case management in higher education is a relatively new phenomenon, the challenges presented by COVID-19 have forced many institutions to deliver emergency services in an extremely rapid fashion and adopt case management strategies to serve students in crisis. This case study shares how one large community college system developed a…

Hurricane Katrina reshaped college workforce development programs as thoroughly as it did the coastline--but in this case, the changes were for the good of students, employers and the community. This article discusses the effects and changes made by 4 community colleges who were effected by Hurricane Katrina: (1) Louisiana Community and Technical…

As a presidential search consultant, Preston Pulliams has had the opportunity to observe and participate in many presidential search interviews and the meetings where hiring decisions are made. He has observed how some interview candidates simply knocked themselves out of contention by employing one or more of five poor interview strategies. In…

Service learning is one of the most effective teaching methods for engaging and retaining community college students, but it comes with its challenges. For many students, the added requirements of a service learning experience can become one more responsibility in an already too-long list. In addition to being responsible for children, holding…

Being a college president has been Kenya Ayers' goal since she started in higher education in the late 1990s. "I'm really clear," she says. "I want to do this." Ayers is well on her way. She's been a provost, an academic dean and an administrative one, and an associate vice president of academic affairs at colleges in…

Planning ahead, practicing your response for various scenarios, being open and honest, showing empathy and respect for other peoples' perspectives and assuring stakeholders that you have the situation covered are the foundations of communicating successfully during a crisis, experts say. This article provides strategies for Community College…

First-time community college presidents are typically chosen from the senior ranks of two-year colleges' administrations, so they know what the job entails to some extent--at least from a close secondhand perspective. Leaders of community colleges who have taken the reins in the mid-2010s say that a close secondhand view only goes so far in…

It is argued that social legitimation is possible through hegemony whereby people of a given social system see the system as legitimate through the naturalness of a way of thinking about issues of all kinds. But, how this naturalness is articulated against a certain context is empirically under-explored. This study attempts to address this issue…

This quantitative study explored the statistical relationship between American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) leadership competencies and data-driven decision making (DDDM) literacy among rural community college leaders in the Midwest. Specifically, the authors examined how AACC community college leadership competencies may predict the…

We explore institutional change and organizational learning in higher education in the context of a large-scale reform of developmental education in Florida. We use statewide survey data to examine administrators' perceptions of the use and effectiveness of accountability metrics, methods to identify solutions to improve student outcomes, and…