With Great Challenges Come Great Opportunities: Promising Practices of Texas Community Colleges

Enrollment at Texas community colleges has increased substantially in recent years. Texas community colleges have a multitude of diverse missions, from academic degrees to technical certifications, remedial education, recreational self-fulfillment courses, and more. This diversity of student and community needs poses significant challenges to a community college's ability to produce successful outcomes for its students and community. TG's Center for Financial Aid Policy in Community Colleges commissioned a report to examine how high-performing Texas community colleges were meeting those challenges. In this report, a qualitative approach was used to gather descriptive information from three top-performing Texas community colleges: Northwest Vista College, Temple College, and Wharton County Junior College. This report provides a summary of recurring themes discovered among these institutions to help guide community colleges as they formulate future initiatives. (Contains 8 charts.)