Which community college is the largest in the state

Since , approximately , students have been educated at the two-year school, according to the college website, which notes that every year more than students transfer to a four-year school, with 2, moving on to the University of Virginia. Most of these accolades are due to the work of the Pierce College Foundation , a nonprofit c 3 that works with the community to provide the resources students need to succeed.

These needs can be as small as money for a textbook or as large as rent, daycare, or life-saving medical treatment. The school has over associate degree and technical diploma programs and 16 apprenticeships available for study. Beyond its small size and small student-to-faculty ratio, Central Wyoming College is also known as a creative hub in the region.

A visual and performing arts center on campus draws people from all over the region to a diverse lineup of events and performances, and the college is the broadcast home of PBS in the state. You may also like: The best streaming services for sports in Written by: Angela Underwood. Elizabeth Jackson. Republish this story. Best community college in every state. Read on to find out the best community colleges in every state. Photo courtesy of Marion Military Institute.

Alabama: Marion Military Institute. Arizona: Eastern Arizona College. Arkansas: Southern Arkansas University Tech. California: Santa Barbara City College. Photo courtesy of Pickens Technical College. Colorado: Pickens Technical College. Connecticut: Asnuntuck Community College. Georgia: South Georgia Technical College. Hawaii: Kapi'olani Community College. Idaho: College of Eastern Idaho. Photo courtesy of Harper College. Illinois: Harper College. Kansas: Cloud County Community College.

Kentucky: Hopkinsville Community College. Louisiana: Sowela Technical Community College. Maine: Northern Maine Community College. Maryland: Howard Community College. Wikimedia Commons. Massachusetts: Greenfield Community College.

Michigan: Washtenaw Community College. Minnesota: Ridgewater College. Mississippi: Holmes Community College. Missouri: State Technical College of Missouri. Montana: Flathead Valley Community College. Nebraska: Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture. Hulleman et al. Indeed, a large body of rigorous, experiment-based research on EV interventions in educational settings illustrates the importance of helping students to build motivation.

A large body of rigorous, experiment-based research on expectancy-value interventions in educational settings illustrates the importance of helping students to build motivation. This type of intervention appears particularly effective for students with low expectations at the beginning of a course Hulleman et al.

These experiments have been conducted in high school Hulleman and Harackiewicz ; Rozek et al. A brief discussion of a college-level EV intervention helps exemplify what this type of intervention entails and how it can affect student outcomes. Hullemen et al. This discussion focuses on the latter. Students were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, and each group received a different writing assignment the assignments were part of the syllabus and were completed for course credit.

These assignments required students to choose a topic covered in the course and write a one to two page essay on the topic; students were required to complete this assignment twice. In the control group, students were not asked to make this personal connection. Neither control group prompt encouraged students to identify the relevance of their coursework for their own lives. These effects were strongest for students with lower prior performance in the course.

Keep in mind that this intervention only required students to write two short essays reflecting on the relevance of their coursework for their lives. Furthermore, this intervention worked particularly well for students with low expectancies.

The authors summarize the practical application of these results:. Although the participants in our research only wrote about two topics mental math and psychology , there is no reason to assume that similar results cannot be obtained in other domains, such as history, English, or chemistry.

Importantly, the students who most often concern teachers—those who perform poorly and have low performance expectations— benefited the most from our intervention, and those with high performance expectations were not harmed by it p.

In short, EV interventions are promising strategies to help improve student motivation. This research illustrates the positive academic outcomes associated with helping students identify the applicability of their coursework to their lives outside the classroom.

Students benefit from perceiving a connection between their coursework and their lives. The implications for improving community college completion rates are two-fold. First, this research on motivation underscores the urgency of addressing structural barriers that make it difficult for students to identify and complete a course of study.

When students, particularly those with low expectations, identify the relevance of their coursework to their lives, they perform better and express more interest in the subject they are studying. Yet, this is precisely the type of connection that can be difficult to make in cafeteria-style settings, where paths of study are unclear and resources are confusing to navigate.

Structural reforms can help students identify and progress along clear pathways from enrollment to graduation. In this environment, it may be easier for students to identify a clear connection between their coursework and their own lives, which may have positive outcomes for their performance and interest in their program of study.

Second, EV interventions may be useful tools for instructors and perhaps advisers in a community college context. These interventions can be tailored to specific courses, and if implemented properly, EV interventions may help students perceive value in their coursework, increase their interest in the course, and improve their performance.

These positive outcomes may be building blocks that help students complete the necessary courses to earn a postsecondary credential or degree. As Section 4 discusses at length, this is not to say that including EV interventions within courses can singlehandedly solve the completion problem; far from it.

However, these interventions may be valuable components of a broader strategy to create a college environment conducive to student success. Community colleges can play a pivotal role in providing individuals with viable pathways into the American middle class, maintaining a strong workforce, and building a competitive 21 st -century economy. Delivering on this promise requires innovative solutions to increase the number of community college students who complete a postsecondary credential or degree.

Delivering on the promise of community college requires innovative policy solutions to increase the number of students who complete a postsecondary credential or degree. The final section of this report offers several policy recommendations about how to address structural and motivational barriers to college completion. These recommendations are designed to help college leaders, employers, researchers, and policymakers identify steps to improve community college completion rates. Among employers, these lessons may be particularly relevant for those who partner with community colleges to create career pathways and for those who hope to do so in the future.

Challenges that students face in navigating the college environment may extend to identifying and completing education and training programs developed in partnership with employers. In developing these programs with college partners, employers can benefit from the insights discussed in this report and the subsequent recommendations. The structural problems discussed above—such as unclear pathways from enrollment to graduation, enormous student-to-adviser ratios that make it challenging to provide one-on-one support, and a lack of easily navigable support services—are fundamental barriers to college completion.

In providing clearer pathways from enrollment to graduation, addressing the structural barriers may help to alleviate some of the motivational barriers that students face. On a more granular level, colleges can also address motivational barriers by supporting instructors, employer partners, and advisers in implementing strategies like the EV interventions described in Section 3 that help students draw connections between their coursework and their lives. However, without addressing the structural problems inherent in a cafeteria-style model, fundamental barriers to completion remain.

The importance of implementing structural changes bears underscoring. Encouragingly, research suggests that EV interventions that are well tailored to specific courses can produce positive outcomes for students in those courses Hullemen et al. At the same time, it is likely that addressing structural barriers is essential to realizing the full potential of EV interventions in a community college context. Take, for example, the proposition of including EV interventions in student orientation.

Orientation may be optional, and students do not necessarily take advantage of advising services offered during this process Bailey et al. Incorporating EV interventions into orientation, while useful in theory, may have limited impact if a small share of incoming students participate. Similarly, in cafeteria-style colleges, this type of intervention may be difficult to implement effectively through advising sessions, as students may not meet regularly enough or long enough with advisers for these interventions to work.

As part of a guided pathways model where students meet regularly with advisers for longer sessions, however, implementing EV interventions through advisement services may be feasible. Advisers could assign a writing prompt or incorporate into their conversations questions designed to help students think about the relevance of their coursework to their career and education goals.

There is a strong and convincing case that the cafeteria-style model impedes students from completing credentials and degrees Scott-Clayton ; Holzer and Baum ; Bailey et al. Results from these evaluations can provide insight into whether and how to tailor the original ASAP program to community colleges outside the CUNY system. Drawing on this growing research base, colleges can adapt tested models of the guided pathways approach to meet their needs.

In addition, Bailey et al. These recommendations can inform pilot programs designed to test new approaches that address the problems inherent in the cafeteria-style model. One dimension of the guided pathways approach is improving advisement and student support services.

The ASAP program, for example, reduced the student-to-adviser ratio. However, similar changes may be impractical for many community college systems given their potential cost. Fortunately, innovative research that leverages emerging technology has identified scalable, cost-effective mechanisms to provide students with targeted support. Innovative research that leverages emerging technology, like artificial intelligence, has identified scalable, cost-effective mechanisms to provide students with targeted support.

They offer detailed guidelines for how to adapt these lessons, which can serve as a starting point for colleges seeking strategies to strengthen their student support services. More broadly, this work provides a foundation for leveraging emerging technologies to reach many more students than was possible before. Lindsay Page and Hunter Gehlbach recently partnered with Georgia State University and AdmitHub to reduce summer melt using Pounce, an artificial intelligence chatbot that uses individually tailored text message outreach Page and Gehlbach These impacts mirror previous summer melt interventions but with far fewer staff.

Thus, one viable avenue for improving student support and advisement services is through tailored outreach and support using technological innovations. While these examples focus on reducing summer melt, there is reason to be optimistic that this type of outreach may be valuable in additional areas of student support services. Indeed, Bailey et al. EV interventions that help students see the relevance of their coursework for their lives can have powerful effects on student outcomes, including increased interest in a subject and improved academic performance.

Particularly when paired with a guided pathways approach that helps students navigate the college environment, this type of intervention may help students perceive the relevance between their coursework and their career and education goals. Correct implementation of EV interventions is important to obtain the desired results.

Recent research on a different type of intervention delivered in an education setting suggests that the level of fidelity matters for student outcomes Horowitz et al. Thus, pilot programs should include adequate training for those who implement the intervention. Ideally, these pilot programs will use a randomized control trial approach to assess the effect of these interventions on relevant student outcomes see Scrivener and Coghlan for a brief discussion of the benefits of randomization , such as academic performance, interest in the course and the relevant field of study, persistence, and graduation rates.

In addition, colleges, employer partners, and research partners should consider the following questions when developing pilot programs:. In addition to knowing how well a program works , college leaders, employer partners, and policymakers need answers to practical questions about how to implement effective programs.

Embedding the following types of questions into evaluations of guided pathways reforms would provide valuable insight into how to implement these changes:. Furthermore, employers that partner with colleges to provide training and education programs related to career pathways may be interested in drawing on the guided pathways approach in their work with community colleges.

Questions that may serve as a starting point for exploring these possibilities include:. Research-practice partnerships may be particularly valuable in developing, implementing, and evaluating guided pathways reforms. Ultimately, partnerships between researchers, colleges, and employers can lead to programs based on a deep understanding of the student population, the college system, and the local labor market.

Working together, these partners can develop evidence-based innovations, continuously improve their programs, and share their results with the wider research, policy, and education communities.

This work can help create a shared road map to reducing barriers to community college completion. Improving community college completion rates should be a top priority for policymakers at all levels of government, employers, community colleges, and the philanthropic community. Earning a postsecondary credential or degree provides a gateway to higher average earnings and opens up career pathways for graduates, while higher completion rates help strengthen the American workforce.

Yet, far too many students who enroll in community college do not complete a degree. While not the subject of this analysis, academic and financial barriers loom large for many students. Ongoing efforts to improve the quality of public K education and to make college more affordable are essential to improving completion rates.

The details of these plans vary, but they all rest on the idea of a federal-state partnership in which the federal government provides large amounts of additional funding to states and, in exchange, states agree to maintain or, ideally, increase their funding.

This additional funding plus institutional collaboration then delivers a free or debt-free college education to students. This is the premise behind all of the major college affordability proposals, including the College for All Act from Sen. It is crucial that these college affordability plans do not solely replace tuition revenue with federal and state funding.

While doing so would deliver a substantially more affordable postsecondary experience for students, it would leave in place worrisome differences in resources that could impede the ability of colleges that charge lower prices to provide the necessary services and supports to improve outcomes.

What that means in practice is designing a federal-state partnership program not just around providing enough resources to deliver a free or debt-free education but also around increasing the allocations for places that currently receive lower levels of support. For example, such a plan could set a minimum per-student revenue goal for every public college based on either a national or regionally adjusted benchmark. It could also provide additional funding to states that spend more on closing resource gaps.

Factoring resource equity into a federal-state partnership is even more important during recessions that may lead to massive state cuts, such as the economic downturn resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

A federal-state partnership should include a maintenance-of-effort provision that ensures state funding levels will not dip below specified levels, while federal investments should automatically increase based on economic triggers, such as jumps in the unemployment rate.

These automatic funding increases could also be explicitly targeted at lower-resourced colleges. The net result would recognize the important countercyclical role of the federal government. Beyond a federal-state partnership, the federal government could also encourage equitable funding between two- and four-year colleges through additional federal grants for institutional operating support. This is similar to the rationale behind Title I spending on K schools: Serving students with greater need requires not just equal investment but also additional support.

There are several ways to structure these operating support grants. One approach would be to provide public institutions that have below-average revenue per student with a set amount of operating support for each Pell Grant recipient they enroll.

As two-year institutions are more likely to enroll low-income students, 18 additional grants could boost the total funding that community colleges receive and narrow revenue gaps between these institutions and their four-year counterparts. Importantly, these funds should be limited to public colleges. They should also come with a personalized performance agreement that sets concrete goals for improving retention and completion for each institution. This provides a way to ensure that the additional funding is also trying to achieve better results.

In the K education sector, two-thirds of state funding formulas recognize that students with greater needs deserve greater resources. States should work to reverse this and provide equitable resources by increasing state funding for two-year institutions.

If state appropriations prioritize their four-year research institutions over the community college system and Black and Latinx students are more likely to attend community colleges, then state funding fails to adequately serve students of color. States should adopt an equity analysis to ensure that their funding models do not disproportionately affect institutions with large populations of students that need more assistance.

This equity analysis should consider all metrics of identity, such as gender, race, class, and more. Addressing state appropriations will look different throughout the nation, as no two state funding formulas are the same.

Additionally, given the current economic challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic, states will face difficulties in closing the revenue gap within a narrow time frame. In the meantime, states can set interim goals to begin to address resource equity. Some potential targets could include halving the revenue gap within a set number of years, raising community college appropriations per FTE to match regional four-year institutions, and incorporating enrollment metrics such as the number of Pell recipients or students of color into state funding formulas.

Similarly, states should consider these demographic questions when deciding the size and scope of any cuts enacted during the response to the coronavirus. Local funding is a crucial but often unexplored component of community college support.

Though it cannot on its own close revenue gaps, states should explore ways to raise some additional funding for community colleges from local sources, particularly those that do not currently provide any local support for these institutions.

States could do this through multiple avenues, including property tax levies, local corporate taxes, or local income taxes. Attempts to increase local funding will also have to contend with potential equity implications in which wealthier areas raise more funds than lower-income localities. This will likely be less of an issue in postsecondary education than in K education because community colleges are generally still more likely to enroll low-income students.

That said, states should still consider policies that allow for more equitable statewide local funding distributions in order to prevent differences in educational quality.

And while issues of college quality are more complex than simply their cost, it is true that the amount of money an institution takes in to educate its students affects the extent of services and supports it can provide. Although it has potentially negative effects on their students, four-year colleges can take in more money from tuition, giving them a potential outlet for making up lost state revenue.

States often spend more on four-year public colleges than their two-year counterparts, and local funding is not enough to fully close these gaps. The result is that four-year colleges have a revenue base nearly three times larger than that of community colleges.

Policy solutions must do a better job recognizing these resource imbalances going forward. In particular, the effort to deliver free or debt-free college must acknowledge the potentially inequitable effects of simply replacing tuition revenue.

While doing so will help students, it will also perpetuate massive revenue gaps and inequality. Similarly, states must think more about how they appropriate dollars to create more parity between types of public colleges. The stakes here are high.

Until the current funding structure prioritizes high-need, low-resourced institutions, higher education will continue to benefit a select few and reinforce a system of inequality—the opposite of what a college degree is meant to achieve. Her work focuses on institutional finances, student outcomes, and college affordability for students and their families. The author would like to acknowledge and thank Ben Miller, Antoinette Flores, Marcella Bombardieri, Kristin Blagg, Sara Garcia, and Marshall Anthony for assisting and reviewing portions of the report and data analysis.

The data used in this analysis come from the U. This analysis only applies to public institutions within the 50 U. The author took several steps to account for variations in institutional accounting and data reporting. The author created new revenue variables that include both public GASB and FASB accounting methods in order to allow for comparison between the reporting methods of institutions.

Next, the author addressed the data reporting inconsistencies between various state university systems. In addition to over 3, online classes, distance learners also have access to online counseling and tutoring services. SAC, located in the city of Walnut, also gives students, faculty, and staff access to personal, academic, and professional support through resources like its Equity Center, El Centro Latinx Chicanx student program, and Mountie Fresh Basic Needs Resources effort.

Students at Las Positas College can choose from various online and on-campus academic options while pursuing associate degrees and professional certificates.

Learners can pursue associate degrees in subjects including administration of justice, communication studies, and LGBTQ studies. Additionally, LPC specifically designs many programs for students who intend to transfer to four-year institutions. LPC, based in Livermore, also offers resources for students outside the classroom. The school, which educates around 6, students a year, provides mental health services, including behavioral health workshops, crisis counseling, and short-term mental health counseling.

Students also have access to a long list of student clubs and organizations. Providing its thousands of students with over 80 associate degree and certificate programs, Diablo Valley College has campuses in Pleasant Hill and San Ramon. DVC is home to a diverse population of learners, including high school graduates, transfer students, and lifelong learners. DVC provides degree-seekers with a varied list of associate degree options, including music industry studies, computer science, and language studies in Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese.

Career-focused certificate programs cover technical areas like HVAC, plumbing, and steamfitting. Students can complete online associate degrees in areas such as administration of justice, business, and history.

Imperial Valley College educates over 6, students annually, offering about 50 degree and certificate programs. With flexible course offerings, students can complete classes on campus and online through synchronous and asynchronous options. In addition to traditional associate degrees, IVC — located east of San Diego — provides academic opportunities for degree-seekers planning to transfer to a four-year institution. Students also have access to fire, police, and correctional training programs.

Student services at IVC include career guidance, counseling, online and in-person tutoring, and food and housing help during hardships. Serving Orange County students since , Santiago Canyon College offers associate degrees and technical certificates in a variety of disciplines. Depending on the focus, SCC designs its two-year associate degree tracks for learners interested in entering the workforce or transferring to a four-year college or university.

Students can earn associate of science and associate of arts degrees in academic disciplines such as economics, art, and astronomy. Career-focused associate degrees include cosmetology and real estate. Students balancing personal and professional obligations can select from a wide variety of online learning options. SCC also provides learners with nonacademic resources through its health and wellness services, Office of Student Equity and Success, and veterans resource center.

De Anza College is one of the larger community colleges in California, educating over 15, students. Learners pursuing an associate degree have access to transfer planning that can help facilitate their admission into out-of-state and California-based colleges and universities.

De Anza offers over 75 associate degrees and over certificates. Additionally, learners can complete certificates in entrepreneurship and network basics entirely online. Like on-campus learners, remote students have access to several resources, including psychological services, online tutoring, and library services. Founded in , Pasadena City College serves over 18, students and offers over associate degree programs.

The school also oversees about certificate of achievement programs and over 40 noncredit certificate programs. PCC's 11 academic divisions include business, engineering, and technology; kinesiology, health, and athletics; and math and computer science.

PCC also provides adult learners with an extensive list of free and flexible noncredit courses that do not require prerequisites. Adult education topics include job training, GED preparation, and parent education classes. Students at PCC can pursue study abroad opportunities.