lthough those of us who have had long careers in the community college sector of higher education have seen many changes, one thing has remained constant-our core mission of providing access to higher education to underserved student populations in our service regions. Thankfully, our understanding of this mission has evolved. In the early 1970s, community college leaders equated this notion of access to simply offering open enrollment degree and certificate programs. Everyone with a high school diploma or GED had a right to enroll in a community college and had "the right to fail." Fortunately, we have moved well beyond this viewpoint and most community colleges now minimally define assess to higher education as access to a reasonable opportunity for each student to achieve his, or her, educational goals.

In addition to an innate desire to support student learning and goal attainment, community college leaders are also under increasing pressure from federal, state, and local government entities and regional accrediting associations to measure, document, and publish their student achievement rates and student learning outcomes. While we understand and accept our responsibility to be accountable to our funding sources, accrediting bodies, and our students, we are concerned that the measures often suggested, such as graduation rates, are inappropriate in our open enrollment educational setting.

Over the years, community college researchers have worked diligently to gain a better understanding of our students' educational goals as well as their academic and student support needs-to identify what works and what does not work to help our students succeed. Our college faculty and staff have used this research to develop and implement an array of academic programs and support services designed to maximize student achievement. Unfortunately, few community college faculty or staff would say that they are satisfied with the student success levels achieved. Too many of our students do not achieve their educational goals, and an achievement gap continues to exist for some minority student populations.

To improve student success rates, community college researchers need to help community college faculty and staff identify better models and resources to assess student learning outcomes at the curricular and co-curricular levels and measure their institutional impact on improving student achievement on our campuses. We need to build the capacity to compare our student outcomes on the program and support service levels to institutional peers in order to identify potential best practices for our individual college settings. We need to identify sensible student goal attainment measures that reflect the diversity of our students' entering academic skill levels and the complexity of their lives. The fulfillment of this research agenda is essential to achieving our mission of providing true access to higher education and a reasonable opportunity for success to our students.

A few focus areas for community colleges researchers that would contribute to the achievement of this goal include the following:

1. Identify better ways to track and measure student goal attainment.



2. Pinpoint significant student transition points, in addition to graduation and transfer, to monitor student progress. Examples may include the completion of developmental course work; movement into and completion of college level writing and mathematics courses; and the achievement of sufficient technical proficiency to secure employment in their field of interest prior to degree completion.



3. Identify courses, portions of courses, or college experiences that function as gatekeepers to goal attainment - the point where many students, or certain student cohort groups, drop out or fail-and analyze the contributing factors.



4. Define appropriate measures of community college student goal attainment that colleges can use to compare their outcomes to institutional peers.



5. Develop and institutionalize research strategies to measure the equity of student goal attainment and outcomes by race, gender, age, and income level and to analyze underlying factors contributing to any inequities identified.

Dr. Lois Alves is Vice President of Enrollment Management at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, MA. She can be reached at alvesl@middlesex.mass.edu.