Mission Statement

The Community College Success Stories Project features essays written by community college students about their journeys to and from open admissions institutions. Our goal is to document and preserve for the reading public the many remarkable life stories that begin every day at our nation's community colleges.

This project privileges writing by community college students themselves, and therefore provides a unique, personal, and rare glimpse into the kinds of lives actually being lived by community college students in America. We highlight in these stories accounts of college life not often studied by educational researchers. It is our hope that this archive will help citizens, legislators, and scholars and researchers develop a more informed, sympathetic, and comprehensive understanding of community colleges and the students who attend them. A unique feature of these essays is that we invited each contributor to include pictures of family members and reproductions of important documents in their lives to provide specificity and context for their readers.

In sharing these stories, we seek to help document the history of the community college one story at a time and to capture some of the powerful emotions and the uniquely American hopes and dreams that pulse beneath the surface of the statistics and graduation rates that have too often been asked to speak for community colleges. In embracing this as an important form of qualitative research, we are privileging the value of listening as a path to wisdom. Here we are following Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: “It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”

We also draw inspiration for this project from Russian Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich and her commitment to forging a new literary “genre where human voices speak for themselves” and tell stories that “are impossible to imagine or invent” (Voices from Big Utopia). We also seek to help further Sheryl Fontaine and Susan Hunter's work, in Writing Ourselves Into the Story, by helping students "write themselves into the story” we are in the process of creating in America about higher education and community colleges.

Overall, it is our hope that this archive of essays will help reshape our understanding of the modern community college and tell a more complete story about our ongoing efforts to democratize the system of higher education in America. We believe that the modern community college is perhaps most essentially a social justice institution, mandated to extend access to higher education to anyone with an interest in pursuing it. We see the stories featured here testifying to—and providing compelling evidence of—this grand and noble endeavor.

The Truman Commission established the modern community college in America in 1947, and the famous words of their report, Higher Education for American Democracy, still ring true today:

American colleges and universities must envision a much larger role for higher education in the national life. They can no longer consider themselves merely the instrument for producing an intellectual elite; they must become the means by which every citizen, youth, and adult is enabled and encouraged to carry his education, formal and informal, as far as his native capacities permit.

This conception is the inevitable consequence of the democratic faith; universal education is indispensable to the full and living realization of the democratic ideal. No society can long remain free unless its members are freemen, and men are not free where ignorance prevails. No more in mind than in body can this Nation or any endure half slave, half free. Education that liberates and ennobles must be made equally available to all. Justice to the individual demands this; the safety and progress of the Nation depend upon it. America cannot afford to let any of its potential human resources go undiscovered and undeveloped.

This site was established, at least in part, to document this noble democratic process in action.

It is an honor to share these stories with you.

For further information about the theory and scholarship that led to the creation of this website, please see Patrick Sullivan’s book about community colleges, Economic Inequality, Neoliberalism, and the American Community College (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).