Community Colleges Under Stress

Abstract

Publicly funded two-year colleges in the US are facing threatening challenges in dealing with rising enrollments of disadvantaged and unprepared students. The disadvantaged and unprepared students are facing various challenges and are asked to fulfill numerous missions, including providing academic, vocational, noncredit, and enrichment courses to their communities and playing a role in local economic development. An early-college program named Early College High School Initiative is deployed that enable the students to combine their work towards a high level diploma and an associate degree or two years of college-level credits to transfer to a four-year institution. Another strategy is to improve the efficacy of remediation is the learning community in which the group of students take various courses together, where faculty would coordinate the teaching. Learning as a group can create a sense of teamwork and connectedness that can improve student motivation and success.

Publication
Issues in Science and Technology