“The report that we wrote set lofty
goals,” says Bumphus. Any time you
ask a 100-year-old institution to redesign, reinvent, and reset itself, it’s going
to take a bit of work.
Fortunately, community college
leaders have never been the type to
shy away from a challenge. Since the
commission’s recommendations debuted
last year in Orlando, Fla., Bumphus says
more than 150 colleges are already using
the document for strategic planning purposes, consulting its recommendations
while making changes to professional
development and other core administrative and instructional functions. Fourteen university professors now use the
report as a planning guide for graduate
education courses. And more than 112
community college presidents, faculty
members, board members, and others
have volunteered to help fulfill the commission’s goal of revamping community
colleges for 21st-century success.
“We’re pulling
together the
tools for
Colleges—the
examples and the
evidenCe—that
Would help them
knoW What to
do in order to
suCCeed.”
—Kay McClenney, director,
Center for Community College
Student Engagement at the
University of Texas at Austin and
co-chair of AACC’s 21st-Century
Commission
Members of the steering committee and implementation teams meet in Washington, D.C.
“We have received a lot of great feed-
back,” Bumphus says. “But the true test of
how we move our institutions forward is
going to be in how our 1,132 community
and technical colleges start to imple-
ment change—start to look at how they
can transform their institutions to have
higher completion rates, serve students,
and deliver such things as developmental
education in a more accelerated fashion.”
Pressure from Washington, funding
constraints, and a nationwide push to
prepare the next generation of American
workers for success in the global economy
have fueled the urgency for change.
From Recommendations
To Reform
Enter the commission’s nine implementation teams—each of which will tackle a
specific area of reform: ( 1) completion, ( 2)
reimagining student pathways, ( 3) community college and K– 12 collaboration
for college readiness, ( 4) developmental
