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Press release from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, March 18, 2010. "A new study of national college graduation data by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) reveals that far too many four-year colleges and universities graduate less than half of their Hispanic students."

By Tamar Lewin, New York Times, June 23 2010. While interest in community colleges is on the rise, budget cuts are drastically decreasing access to students, and decreasing the course offerings. It is actually taking students longer to graduate, as they are denied courses that they need for graduation.

By Allison Keyes reported on Tell Me More (NPR) on March 23, 2010. Urban Prep Charter Academy is Chicago's only all-male charter school. This spring, they will graduate their first class; every member of the class has been accepted to a 4-year university. In this report, Keyes interview the CEO of the school, and one graduating senior. Podcast (10 minutes, 50 secs) also available.

By Alan Greenblatt on NPR, March 29 2010. Greenblatt reports that there was initially great promise for community colleges in the health care reconciliation bill that was passed at the end of March. However, "Congress ultimately took a pass on restructuring the mission of the nation's community colleges." The $12 billion American Graduation Initiative recognized the important role that community colleges could play in producing more college graduates, but the initiative was not included in the final law.

This page has a list of current faculty research projects in the Graduate School.

On PBS NewsHour, April 20, 2010. Jeffrey Brown interview with Mary Spilde and Hilary Pennington about the increased focus on boosting graduation rates in community colleges. Remedial education, innovative technology models and standards for accountabililty are topics covered.

Produced by McKinsey & Company, McKinsey on Society division, December 2012. McKinsey & Company notes that, in many countries, we are faced with "high levels of youth unemployment and a shortage of job seekers with critical skills." In this report, they have compiled case studies of best practices from around the world (with the goal of high employment of program graduates) as well as surveying students about their own prospects based on their education. On this page, links to the report itself (as well as Executive Summary) as well as access to some of the case studies.

If the goal of postsecondary education is employment, this report starts to posit some innovations and solutions.

Website for the PBS Frontline documentary, originally aired September 2012. According the blog post, Introducing "Dropout Nation" (March 23 2012), this Frontline episode is part of the American Graduate: Let's Make It Happen campaign. The story follows a group of students in Houston Texas.

By Nick DeSantis, technology column, The Chronicle of Higher Education April 15 2012. According to this article, at present most student-related data (grades, course selection, graduation rates, etc.) is "locked-up" within colleges. In this new era of "open data" the Dept of Ed and others are calling on colleges and universities to make this data more accessible to developers -- including students in their own institutions.

By Dennis M. Walcott, National column, The Atlantic.com, May 1, 2012. Walcott is the chancellor of New York City's public schools. In this post, he discusses how the City has improved high school graduation rates, but must still raise the bar on preparedness. One step is adoption of the Common Core standards. This page also includes a link to New York City's Common Core Library, instructional resources created by NYC teachers.

Published by CMA (Cox, Matthews, and Associates, Inc.), Diverse is an online magazine that looks at higher education through the lens of diversity. In addition to looking at basics like news, opinions, and jobs, the site also provides special reports and a variety of multimedia offerings. Currently on the home page, a searchable database of Top 100 Minority Degree Producers with subsets for AA, undergrad and graduate degrees

By Jennifer Gonzalez, Students section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February2 2012. The new project is being led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement and will analyze data from four different surveys: Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the Survey of Entering Student Engagement, the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, and the newly created Community College Institutional Survey. Reports will be produced annually for the next three years. See CCCSE tag for first year's report.

By Marc Parry, Technology column, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18 2012. This piece profiles some of the new "Big Data" innovations at Arizona State University, the largest public university in the US. There are systems to track students against the requirements of their majors; recommendations about classes in which they might be successful, etc., all towards the goal of improving retention and graduation rates.

Many provocative ideas in this article, not the least of which is how these applications speak to various "recommender systems," whether telling students what courses to take, professors how to teach, administration how to track, etc.

This wiki offers an evolving collection of technology tools for collaborative work and online education. It is maintained by Margaret Riel and faculty and others from the Masters of Arts in Learning Technologies, Graduate School of Education and Psychology from Pepperdine University. There are a variety of tools and other useful links here -- watch out for currency, though. When visiting the site on 4/1/10, the last update had been Dec 2009.

By David Moltz, News column, Inside Higher Ed, June 21 2010. Jamie Merisotis (president, Lumina Foundation) and Stan Jones (president, Complete College America) urge President Obama "to prioritize the distribution of funds from the recently created Community College and Career Training Grant program to those institutions that radically remodel their certificate and degree programs to emphasize speedy graduation and job placement."

By Jennifer Gonzalez, the Chronicle of Higher Education, August 9 2010. Before an audience at the University of Texas at Austin, Obama called for "the United States to produce and additional eight million college graduates by 2020."

A blog by the Chronicle of Higher Education that started in May 2010, Innovations brings together several regular bloggers on the topic of innovations. Bloggers include Sandy Baum (Skidmore College), Michael McPherson (Spencer Foundation), Marybeth Gasman (Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania), Richard Kahlenberg (Century Foundation), and Richard Vedder (Center for College Affordability and Productivity/Ohio University).

Located within the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, the Center for Social Innovation (CSI) works to "build and strengthen the capacity of individuals and organizations to develop innovative solutions to social problems."

By Kara Spak, Chicago Sun-Times, May 31, 2011. This article cites a recent report released by the Alliance for Excellent Education, which finds that "as many as one-third of students entering higher education need to take some sort of remedial or developmental course...." Putting a human face on these statistics is the profile of one student who graduated from high school with a 3.0 GPA and a B in "College Algebra" but still needed to take a non-credit developmental math course when she got to community college.

By Kristen Amundson, Op/Ed, The Washington Post, May 27 2011. Amundson argues that the state of Virginia is doing itself a disservice by allowing high school students to graduate with a "standard diploma." The diploma requires only three years of math, leaving many students unprepared for college math and thus required to enroll in developmental math.