Christopher Shults lays the foundation for some conversations we desperately need to have. If community colleges are going to survive in forms worthy of their students, they need to have serious conversations—internally and externally—about their business models. Shults provides an expansive overview of their current business models and offers a framework for building a new one. Here's hoping we hear his call.

Matthew Reed, PhD, Senior Executive Officer at the New Jersey Council of County Colleges

This comprehensive look at the community college business model is a framework that offers insights and examples that will ring true to practitioners engaged in the redesign of the student experience into and through our colleges. Most importantly, the author makes a strong case that the business models we use to support this redesign can not be the “accidental” or “de facto” models of the past. The path forward will require leaders to disrupt our current business models with the same intentionality we are using to redesign and transform the learner experiences on our community college campuses.

Karen Stout, President of Achieving the Dream

Today’s community colleges face a crucible moment: how do they continue to advance their access mission in an age of unaligned accountability expectations, shrinking investment in public higher education, nuanced and growing student diversity, and a growing realization that the current economic model is unsustainable within this context. Inevitably, if community colleges are to continue with their distinctly American mission, Shults brilliantly and provocatively challenges the way we conceive of this work and asserts a new business model for the future. Uncomfortable and engaged, it is impossible for a reader to leave this experience unchanged in how one thinks about how community colleges conceive of their future and advancement of the mission. “Reinventing the Community College Business Model” offers a clarion call—are we courageous enough to answer?

Dr. DeRionne Pollard, President, Montgomery College, Rockville, MD