Redesigning Community Colleges for Completion: Lessons from Research on High-Performance Organizations

Abstract

In order to increase rates of student completion on a large scale, community colleges will have to make fundamental changes in the way they operate. This Brief summarizes a literature review that examined research on practices of highly effective organizations in order to provide evidence-based recommendations for community college reform. The Brief describes eight practices that are characteristic of high-performance organizations and presents evidence that these practices have the greatest effect on performance when implemented in concert with one another and aligned to achieve organizational goals. The author then recommends concrete steps that community colleges can take to engage employees in the process of reforming organizational policies and practices. The Brief concludes by describing a model for continuous improvement, whereby colleges measure student learning and progression to ensure that policies and practices support goals for student learning outcomes.

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