This chapter addresses working students in the community college to identify gaps in the literature, presents and analyzes empirical data about working students at community colleges, and points out pathways for further research. It describes some of the predominant conditions that characterize the educational experiences of students who work while enrolled at community colleges. The chapter reviews statistical data at the national level to identify the characteristics that define working students. It shows a negative relationship between full-time work and persistence, defined as attending 9 or more months and/or attaining a credential. The chapter discusses the character of the work-study conflict and its effects on the ways that students experience college. It presents national statistics and statewide statistics from California and New York that depict the association between work and student persistence within the community college.

Based on content analysis of faculty evaluation policies, this article addresses faculty evaluation policies and notes the links between the ideology of neoliberalism and a tournament system of faculty evaluation in research-intensive universities in China and the USA. The focus is upon the similarities and differences of faculty evaluation systems in China and the USA. Faculty evaluation reflects neoliberal values and the logic of the market, with corresponding diminution of academic logic and the traditional values of the academy, particularly academic quality, through market-oriented competition. Both systems are tournament-like systems that emphasize the management of performance and operations of competitive mechanisms, with the goals of efficiency and effectiveness. Three main differences between the faculty evaluation systems in US research universities and Chinese research universities are evident: a traditional concept of collegiality in the US university but not in China; in the USA, criteria for and procedures of faculty promotion evaluation indicate reasonable flexibility while the faculty evaluation system in Chinese research university lacks flexibility; and, service requirements for faculty promotion evaluation in Chinese research universities are not as stringent as in the USA. Two institutional logics operate in the promotion evaluation process of research university faculty—academic and market, or neoliberal—and further research is needed to determine the effects of these two logics.

Through an exploration of university tenure-track faculty's understandings of curriculum and undergraduate students, we uncover their perceptions of academic work and their roles in teaching.In this qualitative investigation, we compare and contrast faculty understandings of teaching and curriculum at a research university and a comprehensive university.In doing so, we explain faculty teaching identity through faculty's self-ascribed professional roles and their responsibilities for teaching.Preliminary findings suggest that faculty members at the comprehensive university see themselves as teachers and educators; their primary instructional goals for undergraduate students are to develop critical thinkers and good citizens.Faculty at the research university, in some contrast, consider teaching a personal concern, with research as the dominant component of their professional identity.

This investigation focuses on Chinese doctoral students' career expectations, and examines how the students' career expectations changed over time under the influence of doctoral training based on survey data of 1467 doctoral students from 8 Chinese universities. Doctoral students' evaluations of doctoral training were identified. The examination indicates that more than half of doctoral students expect a non-academic profession, and more than 70% of students did not alter their professional expectations radically over time. Logistic regression model results indicate that doctoral students' career expectations and their changes over time were influenced by doctoral training in their university environment, students' relationships with supervisors, and students' experiences of collaboration with non-academic organizations. Doctoral students are dissatisfied with doctoral training that does not encourage and prepare them for diverse career paths. We conclude that in the present environment, the goal of doctoral training should not only be the reproduction of "academic successors" but also be the cultivation of "versatile experts."

Objective: With both policy pressures from state governments, including states' funding behaviors, and the logic of the institution deeply ingrained over decades, community colleges face considerable challenge in reconciling conflicting values and requirements. Yet, as organizations they adapt to survive, and outcomes of adaptation may lead to an alteration of mission and identity. The purpose of this field methods research investigation is to explore and explain three states' policies (California, Washington, and Hawai'i) and the variance in three community colleges' organizational responses to these policies in the period of 2000-2014. Method: Data include observations, policy documents, organizational documents, and interviews of administrators and faculty at three community colleges. Results: Findings indicate that the policies and practices of these three states pushed economic, political, and social agendas onto their respective community colleges and imposed liberal market ideals and businesslike behaviors on these institutions. Individual colleges responded to external pressures from the state both by compliance with state requirements and through actions to adjust to state funding reductions. However, in so doing, community colleges endeavored to adhere to the institutional logic of the community college, which in some cases resulted in a blending of logics, the logic of the community college and the logic of neoliberalism. Contributions: This investigation holds implications for community college scholarship and for policy makers: Individual state characteristics need to be taken into consideration in research on community colleges and for the design of education policies.

This qualitative investigation explains the ways in which community college decision makers justify the inclusion of international students at three community colleges in the United States. We identify and explain the ways in which decision makers rationalize institutional policyparticularly recruitment strategies and motivationsrelated to international students, and discuss whether these policies could be considered ethical in a globalized context. Importantly, we conclude that community college decision makers first crafted a class of privileged international students and then justified price discrimination on the basis of said privilege. This vicious circle, we call the international access paradox, prevented decision makers from recognizing or responding to the needs of low socioeconomic status (SES) international students and international students from disadvantaged countries.

This qualitative investigation addresses three new universities in the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta and their presidents’ ascriptions of organizational identity to their universities. Through extended, semi-structured interviews and narrative analysis, this investigation uses organizational identity theory and institutional theory to explain the positionality and understandings of presidents in relationship to their universities’ paths to legitimacy. We found that the preservation of aspects of the institutions’ original identity (as community colleges) aids new universities’ organizational change. Furthermore, while presidents advocated for a replacement of community college logics with university logics, data showed that these three new universities had yet to embrace the university logic fully. We propose that a blending of logics may be the preferred mechanism for the attainment of legitimacy during sectoral change for new universities.

The institutional logic of the community college combines the values and purposes that are historical elements of the institution's identity. Institutional logics are "rule-like structures that constrain organizations or a set of cultural toolkits that provide opportunities for change in the existing structures and practices". Community college practitioners occupy the front line of the adoption, rejection, or blending of institutional logics in the community college. Community college practitioners generate a discourse, a communal language with which they discuss experiences and create meanings that are shared among the members of their group, those who occupy similar roles and organizational locations. For part-time faculty, the discourse of job insecurity, which includes the lack of certainty for continuation of employment and the lack of control over the characteristics of their appointment, suggests a condition that had no end in sight. Graduation and student outcomes initiatives also comprise the discourse of workplace stress.

This chapter offers a fine-grained examination and explanation of specific actions of organizations and specific behaviors of organizational members (i.e., faculty and administrators). In large part, these actions and behaviors are responses, initially, to formal external policies and to external conditions: accountability and accreditation demands, government funding constraints and government initiatives and legislation, and environmental conditions such as population demographics (e.g., ethnic diversity) and political movements (e.g., Occupy movement).

Objective: In an effort to break away from the stale classifications of community college students that stem from the hegemonic perspective of previous literature, this work utilizes the perceptions of community college practitioners to demonstrate new ways of understanding the identities of community college students. Method: By utilizing Gee's identity theory and Grillo's theory of intersectionality, we analyze interviews with community college practitioners from three different community colleges on the West coast of the United States to answer these questions: What identities (i.e., natural, institutional, and discursive) do faculty and administrators recognize in community college students? In what ways do community college faculty and administrators describe and conceptualize community college students? Findings: First, community college student identities are intricate and have changed with time; there are two different institutional views held by organizational membersthe educational view and the managerial view-which both shape the construction of student identities and play a prominent role in determining which students are disadvantaged. Second, organizational members constructed meanings of student achievement and value (i.e., attributes or outcomes of the ideal student, or what policy makers and institutions refer to as success) according to organizational priorities and perspectives. Conclusion: This investigation encapsulates and elucidates the portrayals and understandings of community college students held by community college administrators and faculty as a means to acknowledge the diverse identities among these students. Scholars and practitioners are encouraged to acknowledge the polymorphic identities of this diverse population to improve scholarship and practice.

This chapter is a narrative account of four community colleges—three in the USA and one in Canada—to determine what organizational changes have transpired and the reasons for these changes over the period of 2000–2014. The narrative account details events in organizational history, as well as behaviors and actions of organizational participants and influencers.

This chapter focuses upon both education and training policy and practice in US community colleges following the period of the 1980s and 1990s where the globalization process shaped and influenced these institutions. On the one hand, institutional policy and behaviors pertain to program completion (including credentialing) and student learning outcomes. On the other hand, national policy for a globally competitive workforce points to the ways in which ideology, particularly neoliberal or liberal market ideology, used the globalization process and globalizing tendencies (e.g., international labor forces, immigration, and information technology). This ideology, or at least its tenets, has insinuated itself into public education. We draw upon a longitudinal investigation of US community colleges that highlights three community colleges, examined initially in the period of 1989-1999 and subsequently in the period of 2000-2013. During the former period, these colleges emphasized international education, cultural diversity, and access to further education as well as job preparation as key features of curriculum. Their operations featured efforts of greater efficiency, the use of information and educational technology, international partnerships and projects, and shifts in organizational structures and management. During the latter period, institutional behaviors and actions took on a decidedly more neoliberal tendency, with greater direction by the state as financial concerns, particularly after 2008 (i.e., the Great Recession), student outcome measures, and efforts for greater accountability and legitimacy were evident. As a result, community colleges in the USA reflect both national policy for a globally competitive workforce, so that the US economy can prosper, and states' policies for financial constraints on public expenditures through both the rationing of higher education and the generation of revenues (e.g., international education). Thus, community colleges are both vehicles and models of state policy.

This qualitative investigation of higher education institutional development addresses new universities that were former community colleges in the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. Stemming from an original study conducted nearly two decades earlier, this investigation’s data were collected from the same institutions and from similar sources: institutional documents, government policies, and interviews from faculty and administrators; thus, qualifying as a longitudinal qualitative investigation. This investigation explains institutional instability and identity change as a result of new government policies and institutional norms during the period of 2000-2013. Future research can monitor the influence of neoliberal practices on the development of these new model higher education institutions in the Canadian context.

Although there are claims that neoliberalism has not only commandeered the agenda and actions of universities and colleges but also become identified with the work of academic professionals, there is little empirical evidence to show that neoliberalism has infiltrated the work of faculty. This qualitative field work investigation of three California higher educational institutional types determines that while faculty are not necessarily apologists for or proselytizers of neoliberalism, neoliberal principles are tied to faculty behaviors in subtle and covert ways.

This qualitative investigation of the experiences of faculty of color at community colleges identifies current conditions for this population and suggests potentials for ameliorating conditions that inhibit their job satisfaction. We argue that the current conditions for faculty of color, based upon their expressed experiences at the community colleges, are deleterious to their professional performance, to their positive self-image, and to their contributions to their institutions. Alterations to these current conditions are unlikely without systemic institutional change. Indeed, without improvement to these conditions, the job satisfaction of faculty of color is not likely to change.