CCLP Projects and Initiatives
NISOD
Since 1978, the National Institute for Staff & Organizational Development (NISOD) has been dedicated to the professional development of faculty, administrators, and staff; and to the continued improvement of teaching and learning, with the ultimate goal of student success.
More than 700 community colleges around the world are NISOD-members, including almost every large community college district, the majority of urban and technical colleges in the United States and Canada, and more than 200 small, rural colleges around the world.
NISOD is the outreach vehicle and service arm to the Community College Leadership Program (CCLP).
Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE)
CCCSE was established in 2001 as a project of the Community College Leadership Program at The University of Texas at Austin. Major grants from the Houston Endowment, the Lumina Foundation for Education, the MetLife Foundation, and The Pew Charitable Trusts have supported the work.
CCSSE works in partnership with NSSE, a survey that focuses on four-year colleges and universities. Established in 1998, NSSE is directed by George Kuh and headquartered at Indiana University in the Center for Postsecondary Research and Planning. The NSSE survey, administered to first-year and senior students in four-year institutions, emerged in response to concerns about quality in American undergraduate education and about the lack of emphasis on student learning in the major (and highly visible) college rankings in the United States.
From the beginning, though, there was a recognized need for a student engagement survey specifically designed for community and technical colleges. Thus, CCSSE was launched in 2001, with the intention of producing new information about community college quality and performance that would provide value to institutions in their efforts to improve student learning and retention, while also providing policymakers and the public with more appropriate ways to view the quality of undergraduate education.
Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count
Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count addresses a national imperative: to enhance opportunity for the growing number of students for whom community colleges are the point of entry into higher education. The initiative is a national effort to increase the success of community college students, particularly those in groups that have been under- served in higher education. As its name implies, Achieving the Dream is an initiative that aims to help more students reach their individual goals, which may include obtaining a better job, earning a community college certificate or degree, or attaining a bachelor’s degree.
Community Colleges Bridges to Opportunity Initiative
The Bridges to Opportunity Initiative includes these objectives:
- Promote policy innovation which supports the integration of the multiple community college missions through selected engagement of policymakers, institutional practitioners, and multi-stakeholder coalitions of support from business, labor, and community groups, educational leaders and others;
- Research ways in which state and local policies can enhance community colleges’ efforts to expand educational and economic opportunities for disadvantaged students; and,
- Develop models of effective institutional classroom and administrative practice for use by policymakers, college administrators, and advocacy coalitions.
The Ford Foundation has approved multi-year grants to support state-level reform for developing new policy approaches in six states: Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, Ohio, and Washington. These grants will support policy innovations and strategies that emphasize:
- building support from external constituencies;
- securing buy-in from institutions and state officials;
- enabling policy implementation through technical assistance and capacity-building
activities; - and evaluating policy effectiveness in improving economic and academic outcomes for disadvantaged
students.
An initiative consultant team, based at the Community College Leadership Program at The University of Texas at Austin, will manage the project for the Ford Foundation. The Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, will evaluate the project.
