Community College Student Success: From Boardrooms to Classrooms(ACE Series on Community Colleges)

Student Success: From Board Rooms to Classrooms analyzes the emerging body of scholarly research on student success in an accessible and readable way that community college leaders will find both interesting and relevant. To further illustrate the connections between research and practice, case studies are drawn from community colleges that are engaging in reform. Morest offers a three-pronged approach for community college leaders seeking to improve the success of their students. First, community college leaders need to look around at the technological transformation that has occurred in other service sectors and import some of these ideas to student services. Second, community college leaders need to explicitly socialize their students to become college students and to bond with their community college. Finally, improving the quality of teaching is particularly important with regard to developmental education, where students are attempting to master material that they have ostensibly been taught in the past.

Table of Contents:
The Community College Series Foreword Acknowledgements 1. Understanding the “Community’s” College 2. Transitioning to College 3. Campus Context of Student Success 4. Learning to Work, Working to Learn 5. A Complex Equation: Transfer and Student Success 6. Organizational Change for Student Success Moving the Needle on Student Success About the Author

About the Author :
Vanessa Smith Morest is dean of institutional effectiveness at Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Conneticut and adjunct assistant professor of higher education at Teachers College Columbia University. She is currently serving as president of the National Council for Community College Research and Planning and a member of national committees, including a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education research advisory committee and the taskforce charged with developing the Voluntary Framework of Accountability for community colleges.

Review :
This book does an excellent job of laying out the major issues that face students as they move through the community college and of thoughtfully assessing the state of evidence on noteworthy solutions that are being offered to address these issues. The discussions of retention, developmental education, occupational education, transfer, and organizational change are sophisticated and yet very clear. Vanessa Morest brings a unique combination of skills and experiences to the analysis of the community college as both a well-established researcher and a senior administrator at a community college. This book is very solidly grounded both in research and theory and in concrete experience. This is an excellent review of the challenges faced by community colleges and their students and current approaches to improving student success. I found the chapter on Organizational Change for Student Success particularly compelling because it addresses a complex subject that receives too little attention: the multiple and sometimes contradictory demands affecting colleges seeking transformational change. This book is a welcome addition to the literature, combining scholarly research with the realpolitik of a seasoned practitioner. It should be on the reading list of both veteran and aspiring community college leaders.