The Costs of Completion
The Costs of Completion

Author: Robin G. Isserles

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2021-12-07

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1421442086

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To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.

Paying the Price
Paying the Price

Author: Sara Goldrick-Rab

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-09-01

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 022640448X

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A “bracing and well-argued” study of America’s college debt crisis—“necessary reading for anyone concerned about the fate of American higher education” (Kirkus). College is far too expensive for many people today, and the confusing mix of federal, state, institutional, and private financial aid leaves countless students without the resources they need to pay for it. In Paying the Price, education scholar Sara Goldrick-Rab reveals the devastating effect of these shortfalls. Goldrick-Rab examines a study of 3,000 students who used the support of federal aid and Pell Grants to enroll in public colleges and universities in Wisconsin in 2008. Half the students in the study left college without a degree, while less than 20 percent finished within five years. The cause of their problems, time and again, was lack of money. Unable to afford tuition, books, and living expenses, they worked too many hours at outside jobs, dropped classes, took time off to save money, and even went without adequate food or housing. In many heartbreaking cases, they simply left school—not with a degree, but with crippling debt. Goldrick-Rab combines that data with devastating stories of six individual students, whose struggles make clear the human and financial costs of our convoluted financial aid policies. In the final section of the book, Goldrick-Rab offers a range of possible solutions, from technical improvements to the financial aid application process, to a bold, public sector–focused “first degree free” program. "Honestly one of the most exciting books I've read, because [Goldrick-Rab has] solutions. It's a manual that I'd recommend to anyone out there, if you're a parent, if you're a teacher, if you're a student."—Trevor Noah, The Daily Show

Completing College
Completing College

Author: Vincent Tinto

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-04-15

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0226804526

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Even as the number of students attending college has more than doubled in the past forty years, it is still the case that nearly half of all college students in the United States will not complete their degree within six years. It is clear that much remains to be done toward improving student success. For more than twenty years, Vincent Tinto’s pathbreaking book Leaving College has been recognized as the definitive resource on student retention in higher education. Now, with Completing College, Tinto offers administrators a coherent framework with which to develop and implement programs to promote completion. Deftly distilling an enormous amount of research, Tinto identifies the essential conditions enabling students to succeed and continue on within institutions. Especially during the early years, he shows that students thrive in settings that pair high expectations for success with structured academic, social, and financial support, provide frequent feedback and assessments of their performance, and promote their active involvement with other students and faculty. And while these conditions may be worked on and met at different institutional levels, Tinto points to the classroom as the center of student education and life, and therefore the primary target for institutional action. Improving retention rates continues to be among the most widely studied fields in higher education, and Completing College carefully synthesizes the latest research and, most importantly, translates it into practical steps that administrators can take to enhance student success.

Austerity Blues
Austerity Blues

Author: Michael Fabricant

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2016-11

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1421420678

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Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Project Management for Small Business
Project Management for Small Business

Author: Joseph PHILLIPS

Publisher: AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn

Published: 2011-11-07

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0814417671

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Project management can help companies become more efficient and profitable. But classic project management models often prove too cumbersome for smaller businesses with limited staff resources, tight budgets, and next to no time to devote to learning complex methodologies. These smaller enterprises need the core principles and techniques of project management in a streamlined package. Project Management for Small Business offers simple, repeatable practices for planning, executing, and controlling projects in smaller environments in which one team member may wear multiple hats. Readers will learn how to: ò Define project requirements and scope ò Create a project schedule based on resource availability ò Estimate, budget, and control project costs ò Identify and minimize project risks ò Manage workflow ò Communicate effectively ò Control project change ò And more. Grounded in real-world experience, this practical guide skips the complicated theory and goes straight to the heart of what it really takes to make a project a success.

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges
Redesigning America’s Community Colleges

Author: Thomas R. Bailey

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-04-09

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0674368282

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In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.

Managing Aviation Projects from Concept to Completion
Managing Aviation Projects from Concept to Completion

Author: Triant G. Flouris

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-22

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 1317101952

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Triant Flouris is a prominent academic and administrator in aviation management education; Dennis Lock has more than forty years experience in practising, lecturing and writing about project management. When these two experts combined their considerable talents to write their earlier book Aviation Project Management, it was little wonder that distinguished reviewers gave generous praise and acclaimed it as a welcome addition to what, until then, had been a neglected field. That first title was structured as an essential primer for managers and students. The authors have now written this more in-depth book for managers and students who need to study aviation project management in much greater detail, as well as critically connect project management within an aviation context to prudent business decision-making. Aviation project management is described in considerable detail throughout all stages of a lifecycle that begins when the project is only a vague concept and does not end until the project has been successfully completed, fully documented, and put into operational service. Aviation projects have commonly failed to deliver their expected outcomes on time and have greatly exceeded their intended budgets. Many of those failures would have been prevented if the project managers had adhered to the sound principles of project management, as described and demonstrated throughout this book.