Community Colleges

Sharing solutions to urgent problems

In 2008, MPR convened community college presidents, chancellors, and trustees to help them share strategies for addressing their most pressing problems. At four national meetings, some 70 community college leaders from across the country discussed the challenges they considered most urgent: fostering career pathways, integrating developmental education, establishing statewide articulation agreements, and serving low-literacy adults. Discussions emphasized the need for good data for planning, improving, and sustaining state support for college programs. Lessons learned from the meetings appeared in articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Community College Journal.

STATE WORK

California

California community colleges enroll nearly one-fourth of all community college students in the country. But less than one-fourth of those seeking degrees at these colleges attain their goal or transfer to another institution within six years. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation asked MPR to examine students’ college pathways and the factors influencing their progress. Results show that transfer issues are complex and that students do not always follow a predictable path through community college. Ongoing work for Hewlett includes exploring issues such as graduation rates, college readiness, underprepared students, and community college completion rates. View Report

Wyoming

To ensure that Wyoming’s community colleges meet the needs of the state while maintaining the colleges’ community focus, MPR is working with the Wyoming Community College Commission to develop a statewide strategic plan. The plan will use state priorities as a basis for creating a high-quality system with measurable outcomes and incentives for meeting goals. For more information, contact Laura Horn.

Maine, Montana, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Wisconsin

To help community college systems in these states improve the quality and usefulness of their data, MPR staff worked with state administrators to upgrade accountability measures and data systems by streamlining data collection and enhancing analysis to demonstrate program improvement.