Submit A Success Story

We welcome contributions from community college students who would like to share their success stories with a larger public audience. Our goal is to celebrate America’s community colleges and the students who attend them. We seek to build an archive of thousands of stories that can be searched and accessed by new community college students looking for inspiration and by scholars and researchers interested in qualitative data about students who attend open admissions institutions.

Success stories can be submitted by anyone who has attended, or is currently attending, a community college. Students do not have to be graduates to submit stories. In fact, we welcome stories from students who are still currently in the process of taking classes and pursuing a degree or credential.

The editorial staff here at the Community College Success Stories Project will work much like editors of a newspaper, magazine, or scholarly journal, seeking to help our contributors produce the best piece of writing they can for publication on our website.

Here are the guidelines we have established if you wish to publish your success story on our website:

1. Most essays should be approximately 1500 to 5000 words in length. We have found that this length is ideal for readers at our website. This length allows you to tell your story with both economy and rich detail. So you should strive to write an essay that is approximately this length. Of course, if you have a more complex story to tell, you are welcome to write at more length if you wish.
2. We invite contributors to include pictures and images with their stories, so that readers can get to know you and learn about your journey in ways that simply are not possible in most other forms of scholarship. If you do not wish to include images, that is no problem at all! You can simply submit your story without images.
3. In terms of process, we ask that you work with a faculty mentor/sponsor at your home institution as you compose and revise your success story essay. Your mentor will help you shape your essay for publication on our website. Once you have what you regard as a polished draft, you can submit it to us and we will help you shape it for final publication on our website.
4. Because scholars and researchers will be using this website for research, we need to provide assurances through our editorial and acquisition process that these stories are authentic, to the best of our ability to determine this. Please have your sponsor/mentor send us an e-mail from your home institution using her official college e-mail address (.edu) to provide confirmation that you have worked together on this project and that to the best of your mentor’s knowledge the story recounted in this success story essay is true and accurate. Your mentor’s name and affiliation will accompany your story when it is published online (see below for details).
5. Please feel free to contact us at any point in this process should you have any questions.
6. Please submit all final documents to us in Word (.docx).
7. Please follow the standard presentation format we have established for presenting these documents to readers, which will provide important contextual information to visitors to our website. This standard format, which you can see in use in all of the essays on our website, includes a title, a photo of the author, and a key quote from your essay on the first page. After the first page, you are free to design the layout of your essay however you wish. For the body of your text, please use a 12-point font.
8. Key Words: To aid individuals who are visiting this site, and to aid scholars and researchers who may be searching this site to learn more about particular types of student experiences at community colleges, please provide us with one or more key words to describe who you are and what your journey has involved. You can list more than one if you like. These key terms would include categories like “international student,” “veteran,” “single parent,” “ELL” (English language learner), “ESL,” “Generation 1.5” (students who graduated from a U.S. high school while still acquiring English language skills), “bilingual,” “recent high school graduate,” “changing careers,” “retraining,” “returning adult student,” “not sure I even wanted to attend college,” “seeking direction,” “seeking a better future,” “seeking a better life,” “giving college a try.”

Please include the following information just below your quote:

We look forward to working with you on this exciting project. Please contact us if you have any questions!

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 our 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 all Americans, and we see the stories featured here testifying to—and providing compelling evidence of—this grand and noble endeavor.

For information, questions, or to submit a success story, please contact: