Community colleges have always been the open door of higher education—focusing on students and employers who might not otherwise get served. In recent years, as the accountability push in higher education evolved, that’s translated to an increasing focus not just on getting students to the finish line but beyond it into good jobs. Now, the leading community college reform organization, Achieving the Dream, is taking that a step further—focusing on how community colleges can not only be an engine for success for students, but for entire communities.
To this end, Achieving the Dream designed the “community vibrancy framework,” a model “based on the premise that completion alone does not go far enough to ensure lifelong student success, which is tied to the well-being of the community.”
Last month, the organization released a report with insights from its first cohort of 15 community colleges representing more than 200K students. The framework, using new data sources, helps colleges find students who have traditionally been left behind by postsecondary education. The model hopes to expand financial support for these students and ensure completion of degrees and credentials with a high labor market value.
The colleges in the pilot cohort have all been working toward community vibrancy in one way or another and they are now deepening this work and learning from their peers on how they can broaden it beyond a project-to-project basis. The framework requires colleges to go further in targeting certain groups of students and working with community organizations and employers to find out what the community’s biggest needs are—and how they, as colleges, can be a part of the solution.
The framework was inspired, in part, by the work of former Broward College President, Gregory Haile, with Broward UP and Bunker Hill Community College President and former Achieving the Dream board member, Pam Eddinger, who’s spoken about community colleges as hubs for resources in times of need.
For Karen Stout, president and CEO of Achieving the Dream, the lightbulb moment happened when she was listening to Mike Flores, chancellor at Alamo Colleges District, give a talk about community college transformation.
“It hit me that when you reach whole college transformation, when you start to accelerate student success outcomes, you reduce equity gaps, you do all of that work—you are activating community transformation,” Stout said. “You are beginning to connect that work with, as Mike said, solving poverty in his community.”
Finding Missing Students
A cornerstone of the community vibrancy framework, and the work of Achieving the Dream as a whole, is using new data sources to find the students who are missing from campus. For some, this means using the United Way’s ALICE data, which pinpoints individuals who are employed and living above the poverty line but don’t make enough to make ends meet. It also means finding students whose lives don’t easily fit into higher education structures and schedules.
Formerly Incarcerated Students: North Central State College in rural Ohio has homed in on students involved in the justice system. The postsecondary education attainment level in the region surrounding the college is a good 20 percentage points below the state as a whole and about 40 points below Delaware County, the highest in the state, according to college president Dorey Diab.
“We need to reach out to anybody and everybody who’s willing and able to raise that education attainment,” Diab says. “The population is leaving to urban centers where the jobs are more plentiful and the salaries and benefits are better.”
Those who remain behind, Diab believes, are in desperate need of better opportunities. This led the college to start business and operation management certificates at a nearby prison for those who are about to get out. Nationally, about 1.9M Americans are incarcerated—the vast majority of them men in their prime working years—and that, combined with drug addiction, has devastated the workforce and economic health of rural Ohio and similar regions across the country.
In north central Ohio, manufacturing is the No. 1 business sector, Diab says, and the certificate program at North Central can help students take the first step toward employment and career growth.
Corey Simmons earned his certificate while incarcerated in 2022. He got out of prison the following year and re-enrolled in North Central to earn his associate’s degree in business. Simmons had previously gone to college nearly 20 years earlier, but he never finished as he had a child to take care of and the child’s mother was also going to school. He says North Central made it easy for him to go back to college and then continue to complete a degree. He’s now working in construction for a company and building his own business.
Another student, Seth Brown, also completed his operation management certificate while incarcerated. He had gone to college previously, studying chemistry, before addiction derailed his career. Brown credits the college with helping him get back on his feet.
“It really helped with my inner self more than anything,” Brown says. “It helped me with my confidence, with getting that drive back to be productive in society.”
Advisors helped Brown look for a job and network, and he’s now working at a bookbinding company. Looking to the future, he is thinking about re-enrolling in business courses, hoping to combine it with his background in chemistry to work in quality control for a chemical company someday.
Single Moms: Western Technical College in Wisconsin has spent the last few years researching how the college can better accommodate single parents—particularly mothers, who make up the vast majority of single parents in the region.
President Roger Stanford said it began with looking at the graduation numbers and not being satisfied with how many students were making it to the finish line. And the community, he says, was “begging for more.”
The college worked on closing achievement gaps between white students and students of color and then homed in on single parents, many of whom were also students of color.
“We drew a line in the sand and said, ‘This is going to be a part of our campus,’” Stanford says. “How does that look? What does it mean if somebody brings their kids to class? We used to say no, but what does it mean if you now say single parents have a place? We’re not a childcare center, we’re not armed to really do that, but if a student has to have their kids for an hour, can we have some grace?”
Through its work with Achieving the Dream and the community vibrancy framework, Western Tech has changed policies on due dates and grading to allow for more flexibility. Student lounges now include tables with toys for kids.
The YMCA is running a childcare center on campus, leased at a low cost by the college, and students are given priority in enrolling their kids. The college is also working with another childcare organization on drop-in care, so a student who doesn’t need—and can’t afford—full-time child care can use it for just a few hours a week.
Transforming the Community
J.B. Buxton, president of Durham Technical Community College in North Carolina, said that being a part of the community vibrancy cohort has reminded him “just how deeply enmeshed our colleges are in our communities.”
The most comments he’s ever gotten from community members and people he meets in public were about two initiatives that had very little to do with the traditional academic programs. One is a project to build affordable housing on campus, about 25% of which will be used by students and the rest by members of the community. The other is an initiative in which the college created a short-term program to train 911 dispatchers when the city of Durham announced a shortage.
In the college’s strategic planning for the next year, leaders will be looking at how they can learn more about what the community’s needs are and partner with other organizations and employers to solve problems.
“What this has made me think about is, How do we go from that episodic issue-by-issue project to taking the full power of the institution and leveraging it with community buy-in and partnership against a larger and more specific problem?,” Buxton says. “We can’t really own the full solution, but we can certainly be an important part of it.”
Threats from Federal Cuts: All that said, the work of creating community vibrancy is facing some significant financial headwinds. Proposed federal cuts, especially to Medicaid, could blow holes in state budgets, at the same time that states and municipalities are grappling with the end of pandemic recovery funding. And a spate of recent executive orders and spending cuts have directly targeted higher education and workforce training programs.
“The Trump administration’s executive orders around reduction in force at the National Science Foundation and other agencies, the threats of budget cuts, the grant freezes and pauses—no matter how temporary—really hamstring the integration of community colleges into the economic and community development conversation across the country,” says Shalin Jyotishi, founder and managing director of New America’s Future of Work and the Innovation Economy Initiative.
The college presidents who spoke with Work Shift are all keeping an eye on what’s happening and waiting to see what impact these orders will have on their work. Even with stable finances, many colleges might not have the resources to match Achieving the Dream’s bold vision—what Stout calls a new North Star—of solving community-wide problems such as poverty. The idea though is to at least point colleges in that direction.
“We have to help colleges design backward with that end in mind,” she says. “They have to know their communities in new and different ways in order to do that.”
Jyotishi sees a lot of value in the framework and thinks it can be adopted at many institutions—though the scope of change they can create in their communities will depend on the size of the college, its historical role in economic development, and its own internal infrastructure.
“Not every community college is going to be able to think about social policy failures in this country,” Jyotishi says. “In the same way, it’s not the responsibility of higher education institutions to solve housing insecurity, to solve for a labor market in which we do not pay essential workers the wages they need to raise a family.”
“But just the same, community colleges are, as their name may imply, for the community—and many of them have been very admirably trying to solve these systemic social policy failures and should be commended for doing that.”