The nation's community colleges recently celebrated their one hundredth anniversary. With the founding of Joliet Junior College in 1901 in Joliet, Illinois, an entirely new higher education institution emerged in our country. This unique type of institution requires unique leaders. Yet, leadership development over the decades has paralleled the development of secondary school leaders, usually without a credential requirement.Secondary school principals and superintendents were the first junior college leaders. Their preparation, including on-the-job training and graduate education, may have served our colleges well as they expanded and met educational needs not served by universities in the first half of the twentieth century. When junior colleges became comprehensive community colleges during the 1960s and 1970s, they became complex institutions of higher education and more like their university peers than the public schools from which they sprang. However, community colleges could be served by taking some leadership development practices from the K-12 sector, such as those requiring formal training for new faculty that emphasizes understanding of institutional mission and history, student characteristics, and appropriate classroom practices.Universities, on the other hand, could not provide role models for community college leadership development. University leaders were frequently selected because of their records as scholars. Scholarly productivity, including research, writing, grants, and theory building, were, and continue to be,

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This investigation was a case study to measure the retention and persistence effects of a learning community in developmental English at an urban community college. The study used student demographic and course outcome data to quantify the extent to which learning community participation could contribute toward remedying the historically low retention and persistence rates among a diverse student population in community colleges. The learning communities in this study consisted of developmental reading and writing courses linked in pairs at the same level, considered to be either one or two levels below college level English. Findings revealed a relationship between learning communities and improved retention in developmental writing courses for all ethnic groups. In addition, retention and persistence was improved for Latino students. The study also revealed that learning communities were most effective when utilized at the higher developmental English level courses compared to the lower level courses.

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What are the characteristics of community college trustees? This introductory chapter details the findings of a survey conducted to provide a demographic and political profile of the trustees representing the thirty‐nine community college districts of Illinois.