Productivity

In the past six years, the Community College Leadership Program has sponsored well over $20 million in research and dissemination activities to improve teaching and learning in American and Canadian community colleges.
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. NISOD is the outreach vehicle and service arm to the Community College Leadership Program (CCLP).
The Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) was established in 2001 as a project of the CCLP. The intention was to produce 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. Major grants from the Houston Endowment, the Lumina Foundation for Education, the MetLife Foundation, and The Pew Charitable Trusts have supported the work.
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. Achieving the Dream receives major funding from the Lumina Foundation for Education, Houston Endowment, Inc., and more than 20 additional foundations.
The Bridges to Opportunity Initiative is a multi-year grant from the Ford Foundation 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. An initiative consultant team, based at the CCLP, will manage the project for the Ford Foundation. The Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, will evaluate the project.
CCLP faculty/researchers have contributed more than 45 published books and 300 articles in national journals during the past 25 years.
CCLP faculty have received over a dozen national awards for research and leadership in the last 10 years, including the Distinguished Research Award presented by the American Council of Universities and Colleges (1994 and 1996) and the Distinguished Educational Book of the Year Award from the Public Broadcasting Service (1994, 1996, and 1999) and The University of Texas Career Research Excellence Award in 1998.
The Community College Leadership Program has three endowed faculty positions in community college leadership:
- The Sid W. Richardson Regents Chair, believed to be the largest in American higher education, was the first established in the field of community colleges.
- The second, the A.M. Aikin Regents Chair in Junior and Community College Education Leadership, was established as a result of the grassroots effort in Texas to honor Senator Aikin for his contributions to Texas community colleges.
- The W.K. Kellogg Regents Professorship in Community College Leadership was established in 1989 at The University of Texas at Austin by the League for Innovation in the Community College to honor the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's decades of support to community colleges.