To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree-or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis-academic momentum-suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college-quantifying credit accumulation and the like-but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.

The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K-12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.

Upon completion of a doctoral degree, how does the newly-minted doctoral completer move forward with their career? Without a plan, or even a mentor as a guide, the path forward may be filled with a variety of professional and personal challenges to overcome. Navigating Post-Doctoral Career Placement, Research, and Professionalism is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of navigating the post-doc, professional environment while also handling the personal anxieties that accompany this navigation. While highlighting topics including self-care, graduate education, and professional planning, this book is ideally designed for doctoral candidates, program directors, recruitment officers, and postgraduate retention specialists.

The Soul of Higher Education: Contemplative Pedagogy, Research and Institutional Life for the Twenty-first Century contributes to an understanding of the importance and implications of a contemplative grounding for higher education. It is the fourth in a series entitled Advances in Workplace Spirituality: Theory, Research and Application, which is intended to be an authoritative and comprehensive series in the field. This volume consists of chapters written by noted scholars from both Eastern and Western traditions that shed light on the following questions: What is an appropriate epistemological grounding for contemplative higher education? How dues the current dominant epistemology in higher education mitigate against contemplative teaching, learning, and research? What alternatives can be offered? How can a contemplative culture be nurtured in the classroom? What difference does that culture make in teaching and learning? What is the role of individual and institutional leadership in creating and sustaining this culture? What is contemplative research? How can the emerging field of contemplative studies fit into the twenty-first-century university? What can faculty and students learn from contemplative practices about how to find peace of mind in a world of higher education characterized by increasing complexity, financial pressures, and conflicts? What does a contemplative organizational structure look like in higher education? How can committees, faculty meetings, and administrative teams use contemplative practices to work more effectively together? How can contemplative decision-making processes be used in higher education? Given hierarchies, turf wars, and academics' propensity for using argument as a weapon, is it possible to introduce contemplative practices into decision-making situations in appropriate ways?

The lack of academic integrity combined with the prevalence of fraud and other forms of unethical behavior are problems that higher education faces in both developing and developed countries, at mass and elite universities, and at public and private institutions. While academic misconduct is not new, massification, internationalization, privatization, digitalization, and commercialization have placed ethical challenges higher on the agenda for many universities. Corruption in academia is particularly unfortunate, not only because the high social regard that universities have traditionally enjoyed, but also because students-young people in critical formative years-spend a significant amount of time in universities. How they experience corruption while enrolled might influence their later personal and professional behavior, the future of their country, and much more. Further, the corruption of the research enterprise is especially serious for the future of science. The contributors to Corruption in Higher Education: Global Challenges and Responses bring a range of perspectives to this critical topic.

In Educating for Social Justice: Field Notes from Rural Communities, educators from across the United States offer their experiences engaging in rural, place-based social justice education. With education settings ranging from university campuses in Georgia to small villages in New Mexico, each chapter details the stories of teaching and learning within the often-overlooked rural areas of the United States. Attempting to highlight the experiences of rural educators, this text explores the triumphs, challenges, and hopes of teachers who strive to implement justice pedagogy in their rural settings. Contributors are: Carey E. Andrzejewski, Hannah Carson Baggett, Sarah N. Baquet, T. Jameson Brewer, Brianna Brown, Christian D. Chan, Elizabeth Churape-Garcia, Jason Collins, Maria Isabel Cortes-Zamora, Jacqueline Daniel, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Katy Farber, Derek R. Ford, Sheri C. Hardee, Jehan Hill, Lynn Liao Hodge, Renee C. Howells, Adam W. Jordan, Rosann Kent, Shea N. Kerkhoff, Jeffery B. Knapp, Peggy Larrick, Leni Marshall, Kelly L. McFaden, Morgan Moore, Kaitlinn Morin, Nora Nunez-Gonzalez, Daniel Paulson, Emma Redden, Angela Redondo, Gregory Samuels, Hiller Spires, Ashley Walther, Serena M. Wilcox, Madison Wolter, and Sharon Wright.

Education for adults ought to consider a both-and mindset when it comes to selecting approaches, values, and program models in today's multi-sector, multi-diverse, and cross-cultural environments of teaching and learning. Experiences from educational professionals can lead to recommendations for these instruction and mentoring approaches of adults that leads to more meaningful learning. Competency-Based and Social-Situational Approaches for Facilitating Learning in Higher Education is a critical research resource that discusses project-based and social-situational instructional practices within community engagement as a method for educating adults. The approaches to designing and implementing learning activities show how to optimize community and business knowledge assets to collaboratively design and implement curricula in order to work toward social justice and community development. Featuring coverage on a spectrum of topics such as community-based learning, political engagement, and urban communities, this book is ideal for professionals, adult education practitioners, faculty, administrators, community activists, researchers, and academicians.