Accelerating Recovery in Community Colleges Network Lead

The Lead will coordinate network meetings and activities and organize working groups on issues of cross-cutting importance to the research teams. The Lead will conduct a national scan of student enrollment, outcomes, and subgroup trends; examine how federal recovery funds are used; and conduct a survey of community colleges to learn more about their responses and unmet needs related to the pandemic. The Lead will convene a national advisory board to establish a forum for identifying recovery research needs and will connect with other stakeholders involved in recovery activities through workshops and webinars.

Stakeholders: Federal and state policymakers, college leaders, administrators, and faculty, and the broader public including students and their families.

Activity Structure and Goals: The Network Lead will engage in three primary activities:

1. Assessment of Student Needs and College Recovery Activities. The Lead team seeks to provide up-to-date information that policymakers and administrators can use to guide policy and program development in the post-pandemic period. Using primary and secondary data sources, the Lead team will provide timely and reliable information on the recovery needs of disproportionately affected student subgroups and the recovery activities implemented by colleges and college systems. First, drawing on the vast student records collected each year by the National Student Clearinghouse, the team will provide annual reports on student enrollments, outcomes, and subgroup trends to gauge progress in pandemic recovery and identify in real time the places and populations that are in greatest need of intervention. Second, the team will assemble and analyze U.S. Department of Education data on community college expenditures from the Higher Education Emergency Relief funds to examine what was spent on emergency aid for students or other institutional purposes. Third, the team will conduct a survey of community colleges in six states—California, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas—to gain deeper insight into the specific pandemic recovery activities they have put in place, which learner subgroups have been targeted and for which purposes, and what issues still need to be addressed. Each of these studies will result in publicly available briefs and working papers as well as data that researchers can use to answer additional questions.
2. Collaboration with Network Research Teams. Twice each year, the Lead team will convene the research team PIs and co-PIs to facilitate cross-team discussion and learning. Soon after commencing the project, the team will organize one working group to design and conduct an institutional survey to describe pandemic recovery activities implemented by community colleges, and a second working group to align plans for defining and analyzing student subgroups. Throughout the project period, the team will form additional working groups in response to needs expressed by the Teams, the national advisory board, and the program office.
3. National Leadership and Dissemination. The Lead will organize and host interactive workshops and webinars to ensure that the research produced by the network is broadly disseminated and is used to inform community college practice and policymaking. The Lead will convene a national advisory board as a forum for identifying and discussing pandemic research recovery needs and improving Network dissemination strategies. The Lead will develop a visually compelling website that elevates the work of the research teams and synthesizes information and resources for community college practitioners, researchers, and policymakers. The Lead will expand Network visibility and reach through use of social media and presentations at the national conferences and meetings organized by community college associations, education policy organizations, and education research associations. The Lead will produce a final synthesis of the network's findings that elevates cross-cutting themes and addresses the implications for higher education policy, practice, and future research.