A mentor, advisor, or even a friend? Making connections in college makes all the difference. What single factor makes for an excellent college education? As it turns out, it's pretty simple: human relationships. Decades of research demonstrate the transformative potential and the lasting legacies of a relationship-rich college experience. Critics suggest that to build connections with peers, faculty, staff, and other mentors is expensive and only an option at elite institutions where instructors have the luxury of time with students. But in this revelatory book brimming with the voices of students, faculty, and staff from across the country, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that relationship-rich environments can and should exist for all students at all types of institutions. In Relationship-Rich Education, Felten and Lambert demonstrate that for relationships to be central in undergraduate education, colleges and universities do not require immense resources, privileged students, or specially qualified faculty and staff. All students learn best in an environment characterized by high expectation and high support, and all faculty and staff can learn to teach and work in ways that enable relationship-based education. Emphasizing the centrality of the classroom experience to fostering quality relationships, Felten and Lambert focus on students' influence in shaping the learning environment for their peers, as well as the key difference a single, well-timed conversation can make in a student's life. They also stress that relationship-rich education is particularly important for first-generation college students, who bring significant capacities to college but often face long-standing inequities and barriers to attaining their educational aspirations. Drawing on nearly 400 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at 29 higher education institutions across the country, Relationship-Rich Education provides readers with practical advice on how they can develop and sustain powerful relationship-based learning in their own contexts. Ultimately, the book is an invitation—and a challenge—for faculty, administrators, and student life staff to move relationships from the periphery to the center of undergraduate education.

Co-published with At last there is a handbook that everyone in higher education can use to help increase transfer student success. This comprehensive resource has been brought together to meet the need for a truly holistic approach to the transfer experience. The book brings together research, theory, practical applications, programmatic illustrations, case studies, encouragement, and inspiration, and is supplemented by an online compendium for continual updates of resources, case studies, and new developments in the world of transfer.Based on a totally different way of thinking about, understanding, and acting to increase transfer student success, The Transfer Experience goes far beyond the traditional, limited view of transfer as a technical process simply about articulating credits, a stage of student development, or a novel enrollment management strategy. Rather, the book introduces a stimulating array of new perspectives, resources, options, models, and recommendations for addressing the many needs of this huge cohort – making the academic, civic, and social justice cases for improving transfer at both transfer-sending and transfer-receiving institutions.

When it was originally released, Thriving in Transitions: A Research-Based Approach to College Student Success represented a paradigm shift in the student success literature, moving the student success conversation beyond college completion to focus on student characteristics that promote high levels of academic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal performance in the college environment. The authors contend that a focus on remediating student characteristics or merely encouraging specific behaviors is inadequate to promote success in college and beyond. Drawing on research on college student thriving completed since 2012, the newly revised collection presents six research studies describing the characteristics that predict thriving in different groups of college students, including first-year students, transfer students, high-risk students, students of color, sophomores, and seniors, and offers recommendations for helping students thrive in college and life. New to this edition is a chapter focused on the role of faculty in supporting college student thriving.

Beyond Free College outlines an audacious national agenda—consistent with, but far more comprehensive than, the current “free college” movement—that builds on the best of US higher education’s populist history such as the G.I. Bill and the community college transfer function. The authors align a wide constellation of higher education trends—online learning, prior learning assessment, competency-based learning, high school college-credit— with a rapidly shifting student transfer environment that privileges college credit as the pivotal educational catalyst to boost access and completion. The book’s agenda seeks greater productive investment in postsecondary education by privileging a single metric—lower-cost-per-degree-granted—as the animating driver of a transfer pathway that will fulfill the potential of its historical, progressive innovators. Beyond Free College’s goal is as simple as it is urgent: To galvanize higher education advocates in an effort to reorganize, reorient, and reignite the transfer function to serve the needs of a neotraditional student population that now constitutes the majority of college-goers in America; and in ways that advance completion, not just access to higher education.

"Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework. In any discipline, there are certain concepts – the ‘jewels in the curriculum’ – whose acquisition is akin to passing through a portal. Learners enter new conceptual (and often affective) territory. Previously inaccessible ways of thinking or practising come into view, without which they cannot progress, and which offer a transformed internal view of subject landscape, or even world view. These conceptual gateways are integrative, exposing the previously hidden interrelatedness of ideas, and are irreversible. However they frequently present troublesome knowledge and are often points at which students become stuck. Difficulty in understanding may leave the learner in a ‘liminal’ state of transition, a ‘betwixt and between’ space of knowing and not knowing, where understanding can approximate to a form of mimicry. Learners navigating such spaces report a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, anxiety, even chaos. The liminal space may equally be one of awe and wonderment. Thresholds research identifies these spaces as key transformational points, crucial to the learner’s development but where they can oscillate and remain for considerable periods. These spaces require not only conceptual but ontological and discursive shifts. This volume, the fourth in a tetralogy on Threshold Concepts, discusses student experiences, and the curriculum interventions of their teachers, in a range of disciplines and professional practices including medicine, law, engineering, architecture and military education. Cover image: Detail from ‘Eve offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden and the serpent’ c.1520–25. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved.

This monograph provides a comprehensive overview of community college education in the United States, emphasizing trends affecting two-year colleges within the past decade. Chapter 1 identifies the social forces that contributed to the development and expansion of community colleges and the continuing changes in institutional purposes. Chapter 2 examines the shifting patterns of student characteristics and goals, the reasons for the predominance of part-time attendance, participation and achievement among minority students, attrition issues, and recent moves toward student assessment. Chapter 3 draws on national data to illustrate the differences between full- and part-time faculty and discusses issues related to tenure, salary, workload, faculty evaluation, moonlighting, burnout, and job satisfaction. Chapter 4 reviews the changes that have taken place in college management as a result of changes in institutional size, the advent of collective bargaining, reductions in available funds, and changes in governance and control. Chapter 5 describes various funding patterns and their relationship to organizational shifts. Chapter 6 discusses the rise of learning resource centers and the maintenance of stability in instructional forms in spite of the introduction of a host of reproducible instructional media. Chapter 7 considers student personnel functions, including counseling, guidance, recruitment, retention, orientation, and extracurricular activities. Chapter 8 traces the rise of occupational education, as it has moved from a peripheral to a central position in the curriculum. Chapter 9 focuses on remedial and developmental programs and addresses the controversies surrounding student assessment and placement. Chapter 10 deals with adult and continuing education, lifelong learning, and community services. Chapters 11 and 12 examine curricular trends in the liberal arts and general education, highlighting problems and proposing solutions. Chapter 13 addresses the philosophical and practical questions that have been raised about the transfer function and the community college's role in enhancing student progress toward higher degrees. Finally, chapter 14 offers projections based on current trends in student and faculty demographics, college organization, curriculum, instruction, and student services. (JMC)

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.

This research-based book with practical applications teaches academic librarians to support their transfer students effectively at both universities and community colleges, even when transfer students' information literacy needs differ from those of other students. Colleges and universities across the United States serve a large and growing population of transfer students. Current estimates suggest that more than one third of college students transfer from one institution of higher education to another at least once. At some institutions, transfer students compose up to fifty to sixty percent of the new incoming class. Academic librarians' understanding of the demographics and potential needs of transfer students is essential to supporting their success and mitigating "transfer shock." Just as public libraries often bridge gaps between individuals and services, academic libraries can proactively support the often unique needs of transfer students by spearheading textbook affordability initiatives, developing innovative programming, and making appropriate referrals to non-library student services. In this practical guide to supporting transfer students, authors Peggy L. Nuhn and Karen F. Kaufmann teach academic librarians how to optimize information literacy instruction, support research, help reduce stress, and connect the library to virtual students. They emphasize the importance of establishing partnerships with feeder institutions and other campus departments to best support transfer student success.

Currently, U.S. community colleges serve nearly half of all students of color in higher education who, for a multitude of reasons, do not continue their education by transferring to a university. For those students who do transfer, often the responsibility for the application process, retention, graduation, and overall success is placed on them rather than their respective institutions. This book aims to provide direction toward the development and maintenance of a transfer receptive culture, which is defined as an institutional commitment by a university to support transfer students of color. A transfer receptive culture explicitly acknowledges the roles of race and racism in the vertical transfer process from a community college to a university and unapologetically centers transfer as a form of equity in the higher education pipeline. The framework is guided by critical race theory in education, which acknowledges the role of white supremacy and its contemporary and historical role in shaping institutions of higher learning.

"Supporting Today's Students in the Library collects current strategies from all types of academic libraries for retaining and graduating nontraditional students, with many of them based on learning theories and teaching methodologies. The book explores methods for overcoming language barriers, discusses best practices, and presents case studies that support the changing student population. Additionally, Supporting Today's Students in the Library provides a variety of ideas for new services, spaces, and outreach opportunities that support nontraditional students on campus and beyond"--