The Association of Community College Trustees
Who We Are
The mission of the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) is to promote effective board governance through advocacy and education. ACCT seeks to foster greater understanding of and appreciation for community college boards in their efforts to develop public policies focusing on meeting community needs; help build board governance leadership and advocacy capacity through in-service education and training programs; and support boards through specialized services and programs.
Why College Completion Is Important To Us
In 2009, the ACCT Board of Directors endorsed a new set of strategic priorities called Access for Success to refine ACCT's vision for the 2010-2015 term. The name refers to the community college movement's historic commitment to providing equal access to higher education to anyone who seeks it.
ACCT's new priorities do not compromise this commitment, but rather build on it, with a new emphasis on student success. The first of these new strategic priorities is "advocating for federal funding and programmatic priorities that balance promoting access while improving community college persistence and completion." In other words, the college completion agenda is important because it is a large part of ACCT's vision for the future role of community colleges.
What We Are Doing To Promote College Completion
- Access for Success - ACCT has developed a new set of strategic priorities for 2010 through 2015, which place student success and completion at the top of the list.
- Voluntary Framework of Accountability - In partnership with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and The College Board, ACCT is developing a new Voluntary Framework of Accountability to identify benchmarks by which community colleges can be accurately and precisely measured. This unprecedented development stands to change the ways in which community and technical colleges evaluate student success and measure their own success in serving students' needs and the needs of their communities.
- Governance Institute for Student Success - In 2010, ACCT, in cooperation with the University of Texas at Austin's Community College Leadership Program (CCLP), received a three-year grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to establish a new state-based initiative to enhance community college governance with a prioritization on student success and completion. The Governance Institute for Student Success is a national initiative designed to provide a governance leadership model that will identify key policy decisions, actions, and levers for institutional transformation that trustees and presidents can utilize throughout the country to support innovation, accountability, and work to break the logjam of developmental education and improve student success and completion. The first two Governance Institutes for Student Success were held September 20-24, 2010, in Ohio, and were attended by trustees and presidents from 22 of the 23 community colleges in the state of Ohio. The initiative has received the endorsement of Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and Chancellor Eric D. Fingerhut.
- Community College Completion Summit - In advance of the 41st Annual ACCT Leadership Congress on October 20-23, 2010, ACCT hosted a one-day Community College Completion Summit that brought together the nation's leaders in higher education to deliberate on issues surrounding college completion.
- ACCT Leadership Congress - The 41st Annual ACCT Leadership Congress featured a track of student success-oriented sessions, including a featured keynote session by Mark Milliron of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a special town hall meeting dedicated entirely to the completion agenda. The town hall featured ACCT President and CEO J. Noah Brown, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Senior Program Officer Linda Baer, and U.S. Department of Education Deputy Assistant for Community College Frank Chong.
