Programs and Practices
In November 2021, 16 unemployed or underemployed individuals began their journey toward bettering their lives and those of their families by becoming the first cohort to participate in Santa Fe College’s (SF) new Achieve, Conquer, Believe and Excel (ACB Excel) program. ACB Excel’s mission is to empower members of the SF community who want to break the cycle of poverty, but need the financial and emotional support to do so. The concept for this program stemmed from conversations that the college’s president, Dr. Paul Broadie II, had with community leaders regarding local economic needs and...
Critical thinking and clinical judgement of the nursing student is essential to the preparation of a competent novice nurse. Opportunities for students to practice making high-stakes decisions independently can be limited in the live clinical setting, for obvious safety reasons. Variations among local clinical placements may further limit the ability for entire cohorts to experience equitable patient cases. In addition, multiple nursing schools are competing for a limited number of clinical sites, straining programs’ abilities to meet clinical contact hour requirements. High-quality...
In 2022, Humber College launched the Bhutan Education and Skills Training (BEST) project, a five-year, $4.8 million (CND) initiative funded through the Government of Canada to support the reformation of the technical and vocational education and training (TVET) system in Bhutan’s technical training institutions. The project unites Humber College, Bhutan’s Ministry of Education and Skills Development, 10 national TVET institutions across Bhutan, the private sector, and local civil society organizations. The project is focused on building institutional capacity to support students who are often...
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...
Environmental Science is a gateway class for environmental programs offered at Delta College. In the past, students taking this course were enrolled in the Environmental Science program. However, in fall 2022, my first semester teaching the class, students were enrolled to fulfill a general education requirement. At the end of class on day one, I began to reflect upon how to keep these students interested in a course that most of them had saved for last and dreaded taking. The development of a project that would get students excited about science and allow them to find value in the subject...
We’ve all gotten emails that attempt to gain sensitive personal information or hack into our employer’s systems. The pervasiveness of malicious hacking, including phishing campaigns, has made the need to combat such efforts a top priority for businesses across the globe. Santa Fe College (SF) is revolutionizing its security curriculum by training students in the Information Technology Education (ITE) department’s ethical hacking class to conduct phishing campaigns in collaboration with Information Technology Services (ITS). Students gain real-world experience protecting the college’s systems...
Ohio has the third largest manufacturing workforce in the United States, employing approximately 700,000 individuals (Wile, 2021). According to the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association (2022), about 17.5 percent of Ohio's gross domestic product was based on manufacturing in 2020. Intel (2022) recently announced that it will build two new microchip factories in Ohio. According to Intel (2022),
As the largest single private-sector investment in Ohio history, the initial phase of the project is expected to create 3,000 Intel jobs and 7,000 construction jobs over the course of the build, and to...
In January 2018, 14 local school district superintendents and Jackson College’s (JC) President and CEO, Dr. Daniel J. Phelan, initiated the launch of Jackson County Early College (JCEC), designed to offer students the opportunity to earn a high school diploma and an associate degree, certification, or up to 60 college credits. This article highlights the program’s successes since its first students walked through the doors in fall 2018.
Cost Effectiveness
Since the inception of JCEC, JC has reduced tuition and fees for early college students in a variety of ways. The college capped digital...
Community colleges are uniquely situated to address the nation’s need for a highly innovative, adaptable, and skilled workforce. At the federal and state levels, funding is available for design and delivery of workforce-building programs combining academic excellence, technical training, and practical experience.
Santa Fe College (SF) in Gainesville, Florida, has received a state grant to create a STEM-focused charter high school. The charter school will provide students with the tools needed to be successful in the 21st century workforce. SF’s vision is to ensure that each charter school...
For over 100 years, the community college has been evolving as one of the most effective institutions of higher education in addressing the social and economic needs of the nation. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was general agreement that the community college was a comprehensive college designed to serve the multiple needs of a diverse student body through a variety of programs, including developmental, transfer, vocational, general, and community education. In the past few decades, that purpose has been changing as the developmental, general, and community education programs have been...
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-...
Tags:
The level of alumni engagement at two-year colleges is well below that which is typically found at four-year institutions (Magaw, 2013; Skari, 2013; Theis, 2018). This is an issue that affects community colleges’ bottom line, the experience of currently enrolled students, and the connection between alumni and their institutions.
The lack of alumni engagement at two-year institutions is often the result of misconceptions about alumni loyalty (Skari, 2013). Those working in alumni engagement at the two-year college level have undoubtedly heard excuses for why their institution cannot dedicate...
In October 2012, Austin Community College District (ACC) was awarded a four-year, $2.1 million TAACCCT grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to assist students with the removal of barriers to degree completion and acquisition of entry-level positions in the field of information technology (IT). With grant funds, the college designed a new online competency-based education (CBE) program—Accelerated Programmer Training (APT). The initiative improved distance learning curriculum and delivery, which, in turn, increased student enrollment and graduation rates, and, ultimately, amplified job...
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...
The need for qualified educators continues to grow locally, statewide, and across the country. Nationally, nearly 100,000 teaching positions were filled by individuals not fully qualified to teach as school districts headed into the 2017-2018 academic year, according to the Learning Policy Institute (2017). Polk County Public Schools started classes in August 2018 with nearly 100 teacher vacancies. As Polk County’s only public postsecondary institution offering state-approved teacher education preparation programs, Polk State College partnered with Polk County Public Schools to create the...
The Aims Community College Agricultural Sciences and Technology program received the Outstanding Postsecondary Agriculture Program Award at the National Association of Agriculture Educators (NAAE) Convention in San Antonio, Texas. Aims was one of six programs nationwide to receive the award.
The Aims program was nominated for the award by a local high school, then went on to the national level to compete against other two- and four-year programs as well as adult education programs (e.g., Young Farmers) in the region. The Agricultural Sciences and Technology program’s exemplary faculty and...
Tags:
Since the launch of the American Graduation Initiative in 2009, the call to increase college graduation rates and to create a better educated workforce for the jobs of the future has become nearly universal. According to Former President Obama, speaking at the University of Texas on August 9, 2010, “in a single generation, [the U.S. has] fallen from first place to 12th place in college graduation rates for young adults" (as cited in de Nies, 2010, para. 3). He advocated for America to “once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” by 2020 (as cited in Fry, 2017,...
As higher education evolves to accommodate new forms of learning and new workforce needs, skills are being assessed across an ever-widening range of activities within the learning landscape. Campus-based and online degree programs; professional certificates; competency-based education; open online courses; professional development initiatives; cocurricular and extracurricular activities; and programs in service learning, information literacy, and entrepreneurship are just some of the higher education settings in which competencies worth recognizing are demonstrated or observed. Digital badges...
American College Testing, with over fifty years of college readiness research, defines college readiness as students having “a 50% chance of obtaining a B or higher or about a 75% chance of obtaining a C or higher in the corresponding credit-bearing college courses, which include English Composition, Algebra, Social Science and Biology” (ACT, 2012, p. 3). Unfortunately, the majority of students graduating from high school are not college ready, and the need for improvement in the American high school educational structure is clear. Test results from 2015 give the percentage of high school...