Inclusion
Middlesex Community College (MCC), with campuses in Bedford and Lowell, Massachusetts, has a longstanding mission of educational access and success for its diverse communities, but this commitment was deepened with the adoption of its 2022-2027 strategic plan: With Equity At Its Core. This plan outlines ambitious goals for addressing systemic and persistent disparities in educational outcomes by rooting work across the college in the equity agenda. Recognizing changing community demographics and the need to expand access to high-quality education to all, MCC made a bold move to embed equity...
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In a new spin on the challenge of meeting students where they are, Santa Fe College is serving one student a time, at scale. The SF Achieve initiative offers a unique take on a Promise Program by providing not just financial help, but direct college coaching and mentoring to students in their high schools. College specialists, embedded at local schools everyday throughout the school year, meet with students regularly, get to know them, and help them understand how a college education can serve as a launching pad for their goals and dreams. SF Achieve is literally meeting students where they...
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Delta College exists as a microcosm of our larger society and is, therefore, impacted by historical inequities. Many sociocultural factors prevail at Delta College which predate the current student body, faculty, staff, and administration. Nonetheless, we cannot deny that we all contribute to the current health and vitality of our learning community. Grace Lee Boggs (Harewood & Keefer, 2009) wisely asserted that “you cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it” (para. 60). We are committed to...
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Mesa Community College (MCC) introduced the new Associate in Arts, Emphasis in Anthropology, in fall 2023. This is the fourth Z Degree offered by the college that is entirely online and uses open educational resources (OER), saving students time and money. Chief Online Education Officer Laura Ballard said anthropology was selected for Z Degree learning because,
The department was already offering zero-textbook-cost courses, incorporating openly licensed content, library materials, and instructor-developed content. This allowed us to focus on design and copyright when building out the degree...
Since its inception, Anne Arundel Community College’s (AACC) Model Course Program has provided over 100 faculty members with the opportunity to deepen their understanding of social hierarchy, structural inequalities, and individual-level biases and to apply diversity, equity, inclusion, antiracism, and accessibility (DEIAA) theory and praxis to their curriculum and pedagogy. The program began with a focus on highly enrolled classes, with the goal of eradicating race/ethnicity-based equity gaps in student outcomes. Each year, the program has evolved, expanded, and continuously improved based...
In spring 2020, a dozen Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) students gathered as a crew to virtually discuss topics for a new podcast series project. The project was the brainchild of Beth Baunoch, Associate Professor of Media Studies, who wanted to give her students a broader platform to create new media and learn new skills in the process. To make that happen, she applied for and received a $40,000 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship stipend.
Choosing one topic to investigate for the podcast series was challenging, but Baunoch wanted her students to come up with a...
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Community colleges serve their local communities by providing quality, affordable, and accessible education, transfer opportunities, workforce training, and career credentials for the benefit of all those who live and work in the region. To ensure that they provide the education and training needed by businesses, governments, and individuals in their local areas, community colleges must build strong partnerships with local employers, civic leaders, P-12 educational institutions, potential donors, chambers of commerce, and other entities that promote individual and community growth. Very often...
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Postsecondary institutions have long recognized the importance of student success and retention, with many colleges and universities explicitly emphasizing these goals in their strategic plans (Darabi & Garland, 2018). Throughout the United States, campus learning centers, which the National College Learning Center Association defines as “interactive academic spaces which exist to reinforce and extend student learning in physical and/or virtual environments” (as cited in Darabi & Garland, 2018, p. 4), regularly contribute to success and retention efforts. Delta College, which serves...
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In 2016, a group of students sent a letter to Seattle Central College’s administrators to name a part of their identity they felt was being overlooked as they embarked on a journey that would be pivotal in determining their futures. The students, who were previously incarcerated, had chosen education as the path to restart their lives upon leaving a Washington state prison. While community and technical colleges are open access institutions, they are still institutions with barriers that are, at times, only visible to some of the most minoritized and marginalized in our communities. In...
Mesa Community College (MCC) and the Family Involvement Center (FIC) are collaborating to offer the Parent Peer Support Social Work Scholarship Stipend Program, an innovative program bolstering support for families overcoming past adversity and crisis while building careers in the profession of social work. Specifically, FIC and the MCC Social Work programs are piloting an education, training, and career pathway for parents with opioid/substance use disorder (OUD/SUD) and lived experience having a child involved with the Department of Child Safety (DCS).
The social work stipend program was...
Colleges and universities across the U.S. and beyond are striving to recruit and retain a diverse faculty that is representative of their student populations. Institutions have revamped their practices to ensure that faculty diversity is at the forefront of hiring considerations; everything from recruitment practices to committee trainings has been transformed with great care. A recent step taken by Austin Community College (ACC) to enhance its diversity efforts was to pilot the inclusion of the student voice when hiring full-time faculty. While it is standard practice to involve graduate...
Calhoun Community College and Drake State Community & Technical College officials have developed a partnership that will not only address learning obstacles for adult learners, but job training needs as well. Greater Opportunities for Adult Learners (GOAL) is a free program designed specifically for individuals who do not have a high school diploma and want to become more employable. Individuals who enroll in the program have access to educational resources focused on improving their reading, math, and language skills to obtain a GED, learn English as a second language, and/or earn a...
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Rio Salado College (RSC) and InScribe have partnered to launch a pilot series of innovative digital communities that will allow RSC’s students to easily connect with their peers, advisors, and faculty to promote engagement and improve outcomes. These interactive spaces were designed in partnership with the college’s student leaders, incorporating their experience and feedback to ensure that each community is engaging, impactful, and relevant.
The decision to adopt a digital community strategy aligns with RSC's commitment to flexible, on-demand student support and creating an inclusive culture...
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College students who are parents, a.k.a., student-parents, have always been enrolled in community colleges, but only within the past few years have they been explicitly recognized as a distinct student group with a unique set of support needs. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (2018), more than one in five postsecondary students in the U.S. is a student-parent. This holds true at Monroe Community College (MCC), where 21.4 percent of students enrolled in 2019-2020 had children under age 18 (DeMario, 2021).
Student-Parent Risk Factors
Figure 1 shows that MCC’s student-...
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For decades, Jackson College (JC) has been a U.S. leader in providing higher education access and opportunity to incarcerated students. The town of Jackson, Michigan, has long been known as a “prison city,” and three large correctional facilities are located less than 15 miles from JC’s Central Campus. In 1967, the college offered its first class “inside the walls.” In 1969-1970, a pilot prison education program for the Southern Michigan Prison was launched to provide qualifying inmates an opportunity to further their education.
Jackson Community College (as it was then called) was one of 26...
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A unique partnership between Johnson County Community College’s (JCCC) Continuing Education Transportation program and Johnson County Adult Education’s (JCAE) Literacy program puts newly trained truck drivers on the road to success. The initiative helps non-native English speakers in Johnson County obtain workforce skills in truck driving.
Chris Specht, former Program Coordinator of Accelerating Opportunity: Kansas at JCCC, began laying the groundwork in 2017. Thanks to the combined effort of many at the college, the program officially launched in summer 2020.
“The collaboration between the...
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Rio Salado College is one of 67 postsecondary institutions to be included in an expansion of the U.S. Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative. One-hundred and thirty colleges in 42 states and the District of Columbia will now be involved in this initiative, which provides need-based Pell grants for people incarcerated in state and federal prisons to pursue higher learning. The majority of incarcerated individuals are Pell-eligible, but they have been banned from applying for assistance since 1994 as a result of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law...
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The Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) Honors Council is offering a new pilot program called Give Honors A Try! The program permits non-honors students who meet certain criteria to take honors courses and engage in honors-related activities. Each year, CCAC’s Honors Program provides a myriad of opportunities for scholastically minded students to develop leadership skills and to participate in a variety of conferences and community service projects that foster academic and personal enrichment. These include opportunities to hear from guest speakers, field trips, real-world...
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Community college faculty, staff, and administrators face many challenges as they work to support student success, and the mental health of students ranks high on the list of concerns. In fact, suicide is the second leading cause of death among 10- to 34-year-olds (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019) and the tenth leading cause of death across all age groups in the U.S. (National Institute of Mental Health, 2019). Colleges have a unique opportunity to support student success through targeted efforts to reduce the suicide rate.
House Bill 28 (Anielski, R-Walton Hills, OH), passed...
As much as the faculty, classified professionals, and administration at San Diego City College take pride in the 1,500 classes and 200+ degree and certificate programs offered at the 60-acre urban campus, they also understand that the college’s role in supporting and empowering students goes far beyond the classroom. For instance, thirty-nine percent of college students experience significant mental health issues, yet two-thirds with anxiety or depression do not seek treatment (Active Minds, n.d.). Even more alarming is the fact that suicide is the second leading cause of death among college...
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