America’s community colleges are viewed by many—ourselves included—as a not-so-secret weapon in the nation’s competitiveness arsenal. They are the key to a good life for many of our nation’s youth and to the ability of America to remain competitive in the emerging global economy. So we were very surprised at the findings of a new [...]

California Watch Nearly half of the state’s community colleges and a handful of other higher-education institutions now disburse financial aid on debit cards through contracts with Higher One, a financial firm that has come under increasing scrutiny for its multiple fees and aggressive marketing tactics, as well as out of concerns for students’ privacy. At [...]

The U.S. Department of Education released an action plan last week to improve how we measure the success of postsecondary students and institutions. The plan is sure to be met with enthusiasm by community-college leaders across the country. The plan makes recommendations on how to better evaluate and report on community-college performance, many of which [...]

Scorned for the abysmally low number of their students who earn degrees, the nation’s community colleges may be about to more than double their graduation rates—not by turning out a single additional graduate, but by changing the way the rates are calculated. The move comes two and a half years after President Barack Obama called [...]

Even as policymakers struggle to reform remedial-education requirements blamed for derailing the aspirations of countless community-college students, two new studies suggest that many of those students would do fine without them. The studies, both by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, found that as many as a third of students sidetracked into remedial classes because [...]

A year after President Barack Obama stood up at Macomb Community College in Michigan to highlight the need for more graduates and to announce the American Graduation Initiative, the nation’s publicly funded two-year colleges are playing a significant role in his administration’s education and economic initiatives – for better or worse. Community colleges enroll nearly [...]

Community colleges – typically the country’s cheapest option for higher education – face a new and unlikely rival: the fast-growing industry of for-profit colleges. To understand why students are turning to more expensive options like for-profits, it’s helpful to consider the case of Joseph Carrillo Jr., a 24-year-old who until recently attended American River College [...]

How should “success” be defined and measured at America’s community colleges? It sounds like an easy question that should have an equally easy answer. But the question turns out to be complicated. So does the answer. A common approach to measuring success at most educational institutions – from high schools and community colleges to four-year [...]

For years, community colleges have borne the brunt of state budget cuts nationwide, and they continue to receive the equivalent of poverty wages in federal and state funding. And yet community colleges are much more dependent on state funding than four-year institutions. In Texas, for example, community colleges receive roughly 70 percent of their funding [...]