Posted on October 8, 2009

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Community Colleges to Create New Accountability System

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education have announced two-year grants totaling $1 million to advance development of an accountability system that enables community colleges to improve their programs and graduate more students on time and at lower cost.

Launched last year with a planning grant from Lumina, the project will be piloted at eight sites. Based on the findings from the pilot sites, a new system will be piloted in up to twenty community colleges by 2011. To help move the effort into the implementation phase, the foundations will collaborate with the American Association of Community Colleges, the Association of Community College Trustees, and the College Board.

In July, President Obama challenged community colleges to graduate five million students by 2020. To that end, the U.S. Congress is considering an unprecedented $9 billion in new funding to community colleges in exchange for an improvement in graduation rates. But without an accepted accountability system that evaluates an institution's effectiveness, provides feedback on programs and services that can be used to inform the allocation of resources, and benchmarks an individual college's progress against their counterparts, measuring progress and performance is difficult.

"Community colleges recognize that it is time we focus on success and not just access for our students," said AACC president George Boggs. "Community colleges must do whatever is necessary to help students obtain the degrees, credentials, and training they need to be successful in life and be able to document that success in a meaningful way."

“Community Colleges to Create New Accountability System.” Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Press Release 10/06/09.

Primary Subject: Education
Secondary Subject(s): Higher Education
Location(s): National

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