Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a national initiative to help more community college students succeed, has released a series of guides on the Principles and Practices of Student Success.  The guides explain ATD’s processes for working with colleges on longitudinal cohort analysis, meeting accreditation requirements, evaluating interventions, engaging faculty, strengthening institutional research and information technology capacity, and using data to identify barriers and design interventions. 
The Principles and Practices of Student Success may be found on ATD’s website.

This is a thesis completed by Gregory D. Packin for his degree of Master of Science in Geographic Information Systems at the University of Redlands.

California’s system of community colleges is the largest system of higher education in the world; it is comprised of 110 college campuses and over 2.5 million students. Each day millions of students make the daily commute to the campuses. This commute impacts the students in the form of time spent commuting as well as the monetary cost of owning and driving an automobile. The commute also has an environmental impact upon the local community. This project focuses on one of those environmental impacts, the carbon emissions from the automobiles. Both the impact upon the students and the impact upon the community are directly linked to the distance of the commute. By performing network analysis within a geographic information system (GIS) to estimate the distances which students travel to campus it was possible to provide estimates of the impact of the commute upon the students and the communities through which they travel. The commute distances were estimated by calculating the quickest routes between the centroids of the ZIP codes in which the students reside and the campus which they attend. The results of this project were presented to the Foundation for California Community Colleges to help in raising awareness of the impact of student commuting, and to support future research and planning. The thesis is available for review and download on the CCC GIS Collaborative web site.

Please direct any questions or comments to:

Greg Packin
NGA Support Team (PNS)
U.S. Department of State
202-647-7362
or
gishelpdesk@foundationccc.org