Redesigning Community Colleges for Completion: Lessons from Research on High-Performance Organizations

This paper examines the research from within and outside of higher education on the practices of high-performance organizations. It assesses the extent to which community colleges generally are following these practices and evaluates current reform efforts in light of models of organizational effectiveness that emerge from the research literature. It then reviews research on strategies for engaging faculty and staff in organizational innovation and describes particular challenges community colleges face on this front. The concluding section recommends concrete steps community college leaders can take to redesign how they manage programs and services to increase rates of student completion on a scale needed to help meet national goals for college attainment.