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This literature review aims to look at the unique role of community colleges as they address the information literacy needs of their students, who are by nature continuously in transition to and from the institution.

Library science databases and online sources were reviewed for relevant information.

Community colleges are addressing the needs of their various student populations in a variety of ways.

The role of the community college library is underrepresented in the literature. This review provides more information about the unique role that community colleges fill in the higher education ecosystem.

Community colleges are distinctive types of institutions and should not be looked upon as an extension of the high school nor as the lower years of a university. They are institutions in their own right with a special sensitivity to local needs. Local autonomy is critical to the development of the community colleges. A special emphasis is placed on practical experience in employing faculty members. The emphasis in these colleges is on teaching, not on research. Technical‐vocational programmes are recommended, supported and evaluated, by Advisory Committees of knowledgeable and highly interested laymen. University transfer courses are offered after close consultation with the universities. Adult Education (Extension) is a major emphasis of community colleges, with colleges operating at all hours of the day and week in order to meet local needs and interests. The community colleges stress the open door policy whereby mature students are given opportunities to prove themselves, although lacking formal educational requirements. The enrolment of part‐time students is increasing dramatically. Community colleges function in and out of warehouses, store fronts, playgrounds, old military, bases, etc. Community colleges have not provided educational programmes to any great extent via correspondence courses; however, the television medium is gaining in popularity. Community colleges are generally commuter colleges. Most colleges do not have student residences. Community colleges are more flexible and imaginative, less obstructed by, or interested in, traditional ways of doing things. Community colleges are faced with a shortage of funds as they attempt to meet their objectives.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to encourage community college leaders to make greater use of the human resources organizational frame in understanding their organizations and implementing measures to support its students.

The methodological approach: Concepts are drawn from key texts examining human resources organizational frame analysis and community college leadership to locate areas of community college policy development and operations that resonate with tenets of this organizational frame.

Connections between some of the typical operations and policies of community colleges and the analytical tenets and concerns of the human resources frame are explored.

More in-depth literature analysis could well lead to the discussion of additional measures animated by the human resources frame that can be taken to better support students and their learning.

These connections between the human resources frame and community college policy and methods of operation lead to the authors’ recommendation that community college leaders should make particular efforts think and act with the human resources frame in mind. Emerging issues that are consistent with the concerns and tenets of this frame can be highlighted and recognized for further use in leadership and management practice.

Community colleges are critical in human capital development for all societal sectors. A human resources perspective puts people and human values at the center of organizational analysis.

We add emphasis to leading recommendations for understanding and practice of community colleges through multiple frames. We suggest that the concerns of the human resource organizational frame can help leaders provide thought and action that has additional relevance and possibility.

The purpose of this study is to identify discourses of sustainability of community colleges and how they related to sustainability imaginaries.

This study used a combination of research strategies associated with corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Data included 57 issues of Community College Journal, a professional magazine published by the American Association of Community Colleges, and 2,972 abstracts of dissertations about community colleges. Publication dates ranged from 2010 to 2020.

Community college discourse of sustainability coheres around six themes: careers and fields of study; curriculum and credentialing; campus ecological sustainability; administrative roles and processes; external organizations, partnerships and processes; and fiscal sustainability. There is little evidence of a sustainable living imaginary found.

The analysis is limited to a specific set of professional and academic texts about community colleges. Future researchers should explore discourses of sustainability in other contexts.

There has been no research associated with critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to explore community college discourses of sustainability, specifically in the field of community college leadership. The findings of this study situate the community college within contests over sustainability competencies in the practice of community college leadership development.

This descriptive study explored how community colleges are teaching leadership in technical programs. Leadership education curricular offerings were identified via a survey and selected programs reviewed. 68 Deans, Directors, or Chairpersons of a Business, Management, or Technology program completed the survey, representing 61 community colleges. A review of four programs was conducted through web searches and interviews of leaders representing two of these programs were conducted. Leadership education is an emerging area for community colleges; one that is narrowly defined as workplace readiness, communication, and confidence building activities. There appears to be a need for technical programs to teach students leadership skills, as well as technical skills. Further research is needed to determine which leadership skills are needed for technologists at the community college level.

Over the past 30 years, enrollment in entrepreneurship programming within community colleges has grown substantially. The two-year context poses unique challenges and opportunities for studying entrepreneurship, and the purpose of this paper is to use a narrative review approach to consider the vitality of entrepreneurship education in the community college system. This research captures and reflects key findings from the field and illuminates the current state of scholarship on entrepreneurship education in community colleges. Four key areas are highlighted that describe the primarily challenges and distinctiveness of entrepreneurship education in the community college setting: curricular effectiveness, emphasis, degree and non-degree programs. The general framework that emerges from this narrative review helps to identify gaps in the literature and provides a focal point for future studies.

A structured literature review methodology (Armitage and Keeble-Allen, 2008) was chosen for this study as the state of literature in the specific area of interest did not present general groupings of topics or activities. Given this lack of categorical clarity, the design was specifically focused on bringing together key groupings to provide a framework for further study. The specific methodology adopted standard SLR techniques in terms of article selection, choice and organization. No pre-conceived groupings were used as part of organization of information. The goal was to allow the disparate studies fall into natural categories as greater review and organization continued.

During the authors’ review and analysis of the extant literature, four focal areas emerge that appear to create a general framework for explaining the important matters in community college entrepreneurial education. Those areas are: overall effectiveness, education emphasis, non-credit educational programs, and for-credit educational programs. The following discussion offers a starting point for future investigation. Figure 2 presents this paper’s advocacy arguments and a full literature review follows this initial framework.

Entrepreneurship programs in universities have grown significantly over the last 30 years (Heriot and Simpson, 2007). In the early 1980s, approximately 300 schools had entrepreneurship and small business programs. By the 1990s, that number had increased to 1,050 schools and signaled the beginnings of rapid entrepreneurial education expansion (Solomon et al., 1994). By the early 2000s, entrepreneurship education had exploded to more than 1,600 schools offering over 2,200 courses including journals and mainstream trade publications as well as special issues devoted solely to entrepreneurship (Katz, 2003; in Kuratko, 2005). This growth trend has been mirrored in community colleges (DoBell and Ingle, 2009). Despite that growth, scholarship regarding entrepreneurship education in community colleges has been described as a “wild west” (Truit, 2017) highlighted by little communication or sharing of experiences or cooperative activities beyond limited partnerships both inside or outside of the community college. Existing studies tend to be scattered and practitioner-written while academic articles are often theoretical, focused more on entrepreneurial education in four-year universities and at times promote underspecified models of challenges community colleges face. Given the dearth of scholarly work in the domain, this review attempts to form a comprehensive classification of extant work in order to stimulate and direct future research in this domain. The goal is to provide a current “state of the literature” of entrepreneurial education in community colleges that shares findings, suggests potential areas of inquiry, and helps to structure research arguments. To accomplish this, in the spirit of Hammersley (2001) and Harvey and Moeller (2009), we present a descriptive, narrative review of entrepreneurship education in community colleges in order to gain a better understanding of its complexities.

The purpose of this paper is to descriptively characterize the demographic profiles of entrepreneurship educators (EE) in US community colleges, and include descriptive and inferential examination of their pedagogical modalities, attitudes toward online modality, and use of teaching materials, tools and techniques, with resulting impacts and outcomes on students.

This paper analyzed data collected by the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship on the national landscape of community college entrepreneurship education. The useable sample included 568 responding participants from 270 US community colleges, all of whom self-identified as faculty members who teach entrepreneurship. To enhance the understanding of the findings, a small panel of EE experts was solicited to offer perspective and future study suggestions.

Ten distinct findings are offered. These include EE teaching materials, teaching modalities, use of e-learning and alternative techniques, and their relation to modalities; and examination of five distinct entrepreneurial educational outcomes and their relationship to educator use of pedagogical materials, tools and techniques.

Understanding effective entrepreneurship educational practices is important to globally advancing entrepreneurship education. This paper concentrates on the profiles and practices of educators in the significant but under-researched domain of US community colleges, and offers an incremental contribution and awareness of effective entrepreneurship education teaching methods.

In the USA, as elsewhere, there is an ongoing need to improve quality in higher education. Quality improvement models from business have not been widely embraced, and many other approaches to accountability seem to induce minimal compliance. This paper aims to contend that learning communities represent a viable alternative in the quest for quality. By restructuring the curriculum and promoting creative collaboration, learning communities have become a major reform effort in US colleges.

The paper provides an overview of learning community theory and core practices and four original case studies of institutions that have made learning communities a long‐term focus of their quality improvement efforts.

Findings include: effective learning communities are clearly positioned, aimed at large arenas and issues and are central to the organization's mission; learner‐centered leadership is a key component of effective programs; learning communities offer a high leverage point for pursuing quality; effective learning communities meet faculty where they are; successful initiatives create new organizational structures, roles and processes; successful programs attract and reward competent people and build arenas for learning from one another; and successful programs have a living mission and a lived educational philosophy reaching constantly toward more effective practices.

Educators will draw rich lessons from this concise overview of learning community theory and practice and the story of these successful institutions.

This paper examined relationships between students’ engagement in community service in different contexts through classes, student organizations, work study, and on their own as well as their development of socially responsible leadership at a large, public, research university in the Upper Midwest. Results from the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership survey distributed at a single institution (n = 1,282) suggest, among other things, that students who participated in community service on their own consistently reported higher socially responsible leadership while students who participated in service both on their own and in a student organization reported higher socially responsible leadership in all areas save for consciousness of self.

This study explored the extent to which co-curricular involvement, holding formal leadership roles, and participating in leadership programs contributed to female and male college students’ capacity for socially responsible leadership. It focused specifically on the individual values of the Social Change Model of Leadership Development. An adapted version of Astin’s Input-Environment-Outcome Model was the conceptual framework and the Social Change Model individual values including consciousness of self, congruence, and commitment served as the theoretical framework. Data were collected from a random sample of 3,410 undergraduates at one institution through the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership. Participants completed a web-based survey including the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale-Revised2. Data were analyzed using hierarchical multiple regression to identify the extent to which the environmental variables contributed to outcomes. Involvement in student organizations was the most significant environmental variable and community involvement emerged as significant for women. A discussion of findings and implications is presented.