Review: Redesigning America's Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success

Redesigning America's Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success by Thomas R. Bailey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to really like this book. There are some points to it that are valuable and think can help improve outcomes at community colleges. In particular, the way it considers choice design and providing clearer pathways for students I think is incredibly useful to consider. However, it flails when it talks about classroom design or even when it tries to accurately discuss the student populations. It says that including the part-time faculty is important and yet makes mention of them on less than eight pages in the entire book; the rest of the time, the authors focus on full-time faculty in their remarks. Most problematic is that it is simply too vague and simple. It defines success as graduation but never provides what is a meaningful completion rate to acquire, which is useful to consider when even the authors note that more than half the students are likely to stop because of financial limitations and at least three out of five students are responsible for someone (a child, an ailing parent, etc). I do think it's a relevant read for those who work in the realm of community college, but it has it is not necessarily a great book by any means.

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