Center Projects
Since 1974, the Center for the Study of Community Colleges has engaged in and supported research for improving community college leadership, practice, and policy. This work occurs through three primary strands and has been funded by a wide range of philanthropic organizations.
National Resarch on Community Colleges
The Center frequently engages in research-to-practice partnerships with national community college organizations to maximize the impact of its scholarship and institutional improvement initiatives. Recent and ongoing projects include:
ACCT-CSCC Survey of Community College Trustees
In 2024 the Center and the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) began collaborating to co-design and administer the most comprehensive survey of community college trustees in over 25 years. The survey captures trustees’ beliefs, values, and perspectives on today’s most pressing challenges and opportunities and will inform professional development for trustees and community college leaders seeking to create more equitable and innovative institutions. Results will be available starting in 2025.
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Click here for more information about this project, or here if you are a current community college trustee and would like to participate in the survey.
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The ACCT-CSCC Survey of Community College Trustees is getting some press! Click here to read about how the survey will help trustees guide their institutions "through complex social and financial landscapes and... lead more effectively on behalf of their communities."
Community College Shared Governance Survey
The Center is working closely with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as they administer the first national community college shared governance survey. Results from this survey will provide crucial information about the community college faculty's role in institutional decision-making and the resulting report will be a companion piece to AAUP's 2021 Shared Governance Survey, which provided information about shared governance at four-year colleges and universities.
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This YouTube video provides more information about AAUP's Community College Shared Governance Survey.
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Results will be published in the AAUP Bulletin in late summer 2025.
Connecting Students to Wrap-Around
Services and the Workforce
In partnership with the League for Innovation in the Community College, Eureka! Ranch, and Changing Perspectives, between 2021 and 2024 the Center worked with four community colleges across Arizona - a mix of rural, urban, and tribal institutions - to multiply the effectiveness of community resources in addressing students’ basic needs while connecting students to careers and jobs related to their academic goals.
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Click here for the 2024 summary report.
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This project was generously funded by the Garcia Family Foundation.
AmeriCorps Civic Engagement among Community Colleges Project
Through the AmeriCorps Civic Engagement among Community Colleges Project (ACECCP), the Center is collaborating with Center-Affiliated Scholars at Mississippi State University to develop a landscape analysis of community college civic programs and practices. The ACECCP utilizes an updated version of the Center's Civic Inventory, initially developed as a companion instrument to the Higher Education Civic Outcomes Survey (HECOS).
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In 2024 the research team administered the ACECCP survey to 128 community colleges across 38 states and in 2025 published a Landscape Analysis of Civic and Community College Engagement on Community College Campuses (available here).
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The ACECCP is generously funded by AmeriCorps, though a grant to Mississippi State University.
Projects to Support and Disseminate Community College Scholarship
Since 1974, a core aspect of the Center's mission has been to
increase awareness and utilization of community college scholarship.
The Center works to accomplish this in the following ways.
The Center serves as the fiscal home of the Council for the Study of Community Colleges (CSCC), an AACC-affiliated scholarly association comprised of university-based researchers, community college practitioners, and others who further scholarship on the community college enterprise.​
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CSCC's 66th annual conference will be held on April 3-5, 2025 in Detroit, Michigan. The conference theme is Working in Solidarity for Equitable Community College Futures.
​​​​The Center, in partnership with the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research at NC State University, is collaborating with
ICPSR at the University of Michigan
to create and maintain the
Community College Data Hub (CCDH),
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The CCDH is a collection of datasets and data-related publications associated with community colleges and their students, administrators, faculty, staff, and communities. Data in the CCDH series have been selected by subject-matter experts from the Center and the Belk Center and curated and indexed by ICPSR.
As datasets are added to the CCDH, they can be used by a broad range of scholars and scholar-practitioners for secondary analysis and/or institutional improvement. ​​​​
The Center invites emerging and established community college scholars and scholar-practitioners to participate in the Center-Affiliated Scholars program. Through this program, Center directors and affiliated scholars collaborate to design and conduct research leading to institutional improvement, seek and secure grant funding, and carry out grant activities and associated scholarship. ​​
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The Center-Affiliated Scholars program extends the Center's involvement in and ability to support community college scholarship on a broader scale.
Multi-College Institutional Improvement Initiatives
Drawing on relationships with community college leaders, state agencies, philanthropic organizations, and community college member associations, the Center convenes and administers large-scale institutional improvement initiatives involving multiple community colleges, researchers, evaluators, and other organizations.
Depending on the project, the Center may play a direct role, act in an advisory capacity, and/or provide administrative services to facilitate the receipt and distribution of grant dollars across multiple institutions.
The Center's low indirect cost rate and nonprofit status ensure that the vast majority of each grant can support institutional improvement on college campuses as well as associated research and/or evaluation.
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Contact us for information about convening or funding a multi-college institutional improvement initiative. Publications from previous collaborations are available here.
Funders
The work of the Center for the Study of Community Colleges is made possible by generous support from the following organizations:
