Community Colleges

Barbara Mink is the new director of the community college leadership program at the University of Texas at Austin, the university announced this week. Mink, a clinical professor at the university, takes over for John E. Roueche, the program's founder, who stepped down this year after helping train scores of community college presidents during his 41 years at the helm. Earlier this year Roueche announced that he was starting a similar program at National American University, a for-profit. His departure led to speculation about the future of the leadership program and its affiliates, the Center for Community College Student Engagement and the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development.

The chairman of the board that governs Connecticut's public four- and two-year colleges has rescinded a proposed buyout that officials of the public-college system purportedly offered to presidents of the state's community colleges last month. That incident, which infuriated some of the two-year-college leaders, triggered a series of events that led to the resignations of the top two officials of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, President Robert A. Kennedy and Michael Meotti, the executive vice president. "The Board has not authorized any such arrangement and to the extent such an arrangement was offered at that time or thereafter, it is hereby rescinded," Lewis J. Robinson, chairman of the Board of Regents for Higher Education, said in an e-mailed statement late Tuesday.

The number of associate degrees earned by adult students is growing faster than those earned by traditional-age students, according to the new data from the National Student Clearinghouse's research center. The report, which is based on data from 3,300 institutions, found that the number of two-year degrees awarded by public institutions to students who were at least 25 years old increased by 22 percent in the three years after 2008, when the recession began, compared to a 17 percent increase for younger students.

College completion gets plenty of attention these days. But the challenges many students face in transferring from community colleges to four-year institutions is less visible, according to a new report from the American Association of Community Colleges. In addition to examining those challenges, the report looks at the role of transfer as a pathway to the bachelor's degree and the mobility of credits between institutions. For example, students are almost twice as likely to earn a bachelor's degree when all of their community college transfer credits are accepted by four-year institutions, according to the report, which was written by Christopher M. Mullin, the association's program director for policy analysis.

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter on Thursday appointed himself and several aides to the board of the Community College of Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The board has not previously had a mayor among its members. "What's at work here very simply is that Mayor Nutter has been, from the start of his term as mayor, deeply concerned about and invested in the issues of education and job training and workforce development," a spokesman for the mayor said. "At the nexus, really, of all those issues is Community College of Philadelphia."

City College of San Francisco is planning today to unveil a series of reforms that officials hope will balance its budget and allow it to hold on to accreditation, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. Among the reforms: forcing students who don't pay their tuition to do so, eliminating many "enrichment" classes to shift the curricular focus to courses that allow students to earn degrees or transfer, eliminating paid sabbaticals, increasing the workload of clerical staff members from 37.5 to 40 hours a week and across-the-board salary cuts of 1 percent.