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Discusses how students can maximize their community college education whether they are planning to transfer to a four-year school or are looking for an edge in the job market.

In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.

While community colleges give first-generation students a chance to open the door to education, simply walking through that door is not enough. Once there, many students feel completely alone. As members of a rapidly growing population, these students are in desperate need of a practical, friendly, and useful resource.

To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.

Overall, nearly half of all incoming community college students “drop-out” within twelve months of enrolling, with students of color and the economically disadvantaged faring far worse. Given the high proportion of underserved students these colleges enroll, the detrimental impact on their communities, and for the national economy as a whole at a time of diversifying demographics, is enormous.This book addresses this urgent issue by bringing together nationally recognized researchers whose work throws light on the structural and systemic causes of student attrition, as well as college presidents and leaders who have successfully implemented strategies to improve student outcomes.The book is divided into five sections, each devoted to a demographic group: African Americans, Native Americans/American Indians, Latino Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and Caucasian students in poverty. Each section in turn comprises three chapters, the first providing an up-to-date summary of research findings about barriers and attainments pertaining to the corresponding population, the second the views of a community college president, and the final chapter offering a range of models and best practices for achieving student success.The analyses--descriptions of cutting edge programs--and recommendations for action will commend this volume to everyone concerned about equity and completion rates in the community college sector, from presidents and senior administrators through faculty and student affairs leaders. For educational researchers, it fills blanks on data about attrition and persistence patterns of minority students attending community colleges.ContributorsKenneth AtwaterGlennda M. BivensEdward BushCara CrowleyMaria Harper-MarinickJoan B. HolmesG. Edward HughesLee LambertCynthia Lindquist, Ta’Sunka Wicahpi Win (Star Horse Woman)Angela LongRussell Lowery-HartJamillah MooreChristopher M. MullinBrian MurphyEduardo J. PadrónDeborah A. SantiagoWei SongRobert TeranishiRowena M. TomanengJames UtterbackJ. Luke Wood