Innovations Library

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For Student Success, Mental Health Matters
Itzel Seidel and Poppy Fitch June 2025
Volume: 38 Issue: 6
Count all 24
Mental health has increasingly become a significant barrier to student success in community colleges, second only to the growing cost of tuition (Gallup & Lumina Foundation, 2024). According to The State of Education 2024 by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation (2024), 64 percent of students who considered dropping out of higher education cited stress or mental health struggles as a primary reason.
Tags: Leadership and Organization, Student Services, Access, Diversity, Strategic Planning, Innovations
Middlesex Community College: Centering Equity at Its Core
Philip J. Sisson, Arlene Rodríguez, Matthew Olson, and Noreen McGinness Olson May 2025
Volume: 38 Issue: 5
Count all 30
Middlesex Community College (MCC), with campuses in Bedford and Lowell, Massachusetts, has a longstanding mission of educational access and success for its diverse communities, but this commitment was deepened with the adoption of its 2022-2027 strategic plan: With Equity At Its Core. This plan outlines ambitious goals for addressing systemic and persistent disparities in educational outcomes by rooting work across the college in the equity agenda.
Tags: Leadership and Organization, Student Services, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Strategic Planning, Innovations
The Skills of a Leader
Judy Korb April 2025
Volume: 38 Issue: 4
Count all 343
Leadership can be exciting, rewarding, challenging, and stressful. It requires the ability to think critically, be decisive, show compassion, and build trust daily. Every leader is in a unique situation defined by their role, their team, and the resources available to them. As an executive leadership coach, I have explored leadership roles, challenges, and opportunities from a variety of perspectives. What I have discovered is this: While situations may differ significantly, the challenges and opportunities that meet today’s leaders are often surprisingly similar.
Tags: Leadership Development, Leadership Development, Innovations
Leading Through Change
Monique Umphrey March 2025
Volume: 38 Issue: 3
Count all 350
Change is inevitable in higher education, presenting both challenges and opportunities. Leading effectively through change requires courage, innovation, and compassion. Leaders in higher education must not only navigate these transformations but embrace them as opportunities for growth, innovation, and meaningful progress.
Tags: Leadership and Organization, Innovations
The Strategic Advantage of Internal Hiring in Higher Education
Michelle Kloss and Rosalie Mince February 2025
Volume: 38 Issue: 2
Count all 412
Recent headlines about recruitment and hiring in higher education lament the staffing crisis, an age of interims, and that hiring challenges are only getting worse. In an era in which opinion articles are titled “You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President” (Drezner, 2023) and “The College Presidency Is Broken” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2024), institutions may struggle when faced with turnover in executive and senior-level administrative positions.
Tags: Leadership and Organization, Innovations
Rogue Community College Priorities: Changing From Scarcity to Innovative Mindset
Randy Weber January 2025
Volume: 38 Issue: 1
Count all 17
Established in 1970, Rogue Community College (RCC) serves Oregon residents in Jackson and Josephine counties at campuses in Grants Pass, Medford, and White City. A public two-year community college, RCC offers multiple transfer degrees; more than 80 career and technical education degrees or certificates; a variety of workforce and short-term training, academic skills, and continuing and community education classes; and services to the business community.
Tags: Leadership and Organization, Organizational Culture, Innovations
Building a Collegiate eSports Program: From Remote Beginnings to a Campuswide Innovation
Aaron Bouyea December 2024
Volume: 37 Issue: 12
Count all 344
The rapid growth of competitive eSports over the past 10 years has led to its emergence as a cocurricular program on hundreds of college campuses. Projected to grow to over a two billion dollar industry by the end of 2024 and forecasted to be a nine billion dollar industry by 2032 (Fortune Business Insights, 2024), there is a growing need on college campuses not only to provide opportunities for student engagement via competitive eSports programs but also to develop new and creative degree programs to support this growing industry.
Tags: Learning and Organization, Access, Learning Environments, Innovations
Dallas College Leaders at All Levels: An Intentional Approach to Developing Community College Leaders
Louis Burrell November 2024
Volume: 37 Issue: 11
Count all 415
The ability to lead with empathy, sensitivity, and insight has great potential to propel organizations, and the individuals within them, to success. Dallas College, one of the largest community colleges in Texas, serving more than 125,000 students and 6,000 employees, experienced significant change and change management as it unified seven distinct colleges into one unique institution.
Tags: Leadership Development, Leadership Development, Innovations
Beyond the Numbers: Maximizing the Impact of Student Evaluations of Teaching in Community Colleges
Jill Channing October 2024 Count all 383
Imagine a dedicated community college instructor who has spent countless hours preparing engaging lessons, only to receive a series of lukewarm student evaluations. Despite their best efforts, the feedback highlights issues unrelated to their teaching effectiveness, such as the difficulty of the course material or the timing of classes. This scenario underscores a critical challenge in higher education: the use and interpretation of student evaluations of teaching (SETs). While SETs are a common tool for assessing educational quality, they are not without their pitfalls.
Tags: Learning and Organization, Assessment and Evaluation, Innovations
Leading the Charge in AI Implementation
Feng Hou September 2024
Volume: 37 Issue: 9
Count all 537
St. Louis Community College (STLCC) began using artificial intelligence (AI) to help students, faculty, and staff shortly after the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. The college created a dedicated AI governance team to lead AI implementation, transforming how we deliver and experience education. The team has developed strategic partnerships with AI industry leaders and embarked on numerous innovative projects.
Tags: Leadership and Organization, Access, Learning Resources, Technology Systems, Innovations
Teaming to Drive Organizational Change
Teresa Ong July 2024
Volume: 37 Issue: 7
Count all 512
At the League’s 2024 Innovations Conference, Chancellor Lee Lambert from Foothill-De Anza (FHDA) Community College District and Dorothy Sisneros from Thunderbird Leadership Consulting (TLC) presented a session on teaming and context-based coaching as a method for executive leaders to cultivate and sustain high-performing teams. FHDA is actively implementing teaming and context-based coaching as part of its leadership professional development initiatives. This article provides a first-hand narrative of the use of this approach with two college leadership teams.
Tags: Leadership and Organization, Organizational Culture, Innovations
Training and Retaining Emerging Community College Leaders
Katherine Gonzalez June 2024
Volume: 37 Issue: 6
Count all 358
Developing the next generation of community college leaders may be a matter of survival (Asera, 2019). In 2001, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) sounded the alarm on a community college leadership crisis (Eddy & Garza Mitchell, 2017). Soon after, AACC conducted a leadership survey of community college CEOs which found that half of presidents expected to retire within six years. AACC’s follow-up study 15 years later found that the situation had gotten worse (Eddy & Garza Mitchell, 2017).
Tags: Leadership Development, Leadership Development, Innovations
Third Edition of The Shaping of American Higher Education Highlights the Centrality of Community Colleges in our Contemporary System
Carrie B. Kisker May 2024
Volume: 37 Issue: 5
Count all 264
As a community college scholar and consultant, I have long been distressed by the lack of any significant discussion about the origins and historic and contemporary contributions of Democracy’s Colleges in major texts on the history of American higher education. Historians, it seems, have preferred to focus their gaze on the most prestigious institutions in our country—the Ivys, flagship research universities, some liberal arts standouts—while the workhorses of the system have been grossly underrepresented in the texts.
Tags: Innovations
Centers for Inclusive Democracy: An Integrated Approach to Fundamental Values for Higher Education
Deanna Villanueva-Saucedo and Eddie Genna April 2024
Volume: 37 Issue: 4
Count all 334
The Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) enrolls nearly 140,000 students annually at 10 independently accredited colleges and 31 satellite locations. MCCCD is the top provider of undergraduate education to students of color in the state of Arizona, and 48 percent of its students are first-generation college matriculants (Maricopa Community Colleges, 2024). The district offers degrees and certificates across more than 600 programs, including new bachelor’s degrees in certain fields.
Tags: Leadership and Organization, Organizational Culture, Innovations
Leading Through Large-Scale Institutional Change
Karen Miller March 2024
Volume: 37 Issue: 3
Count all 329
Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) began offering associate degrees as Ohio’s first community college in 1963 and now serves more than 41,000 credit and noncredit students annually. The college encompasses four traditional campuses—Eastern, Western, Metropolitan, and Westshore—and numerous on-campus and off-campus innovative learning facilities and sites.
Tags: Leadership and Organization, Organizational Culture, Innovations

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