ABSTRACT
The introduction will provide a detailed overview of the major dilemmas facing community colleges in the 21st century. Rising enrollment, complex missions, decreased state funding, and an academically diverse student body present challenges to a sector of the higher education marketplace that has been tasked with increasing completion rates. Two-year colleges have historically served as sites for remedial education, zero-credit developmental skills programs that overenrolled low-income, students of color, most of whom fail to complete the required sequences. As the demand for bachelor’s degree attainment grew in the 21st century, it became clear that the barriers created by the community college only served to demographically segregate the postsecondary system, providing opportunity to some and denying it to many. In 2007, the City University of New York announced that it had organized a planning team of higher education experts to design a concept for an experimental community college that would remove the barriers to completion, provide wraparound student support services, and deliver an innovative curriculum aimed at increasing college-level skills. The introduction will provide the national- and institutional-level context that encouraged the inception of the new community college.
