Community College-University Partnerships

More than 8 million students—nearly half the nation’s undergraduates—are enrolled in two-year community colleges, comprising the most diverse college-going population in the US.

As resources shrink, community colleges face challenges to serve these students. Humanities faculty—talented, mission-driven, and often with PhDs—have such large teaching loads that they can rarely support their most promising and motivated students as fully as they deserve.

To provide much-needed support to ambitious but underserved community college students and the dedicated faculty who teach them, Mellon has helped build partnerships between two-year and four-year institutions to streamline transfers between schools, strengthen institutional collaboration, and empower faculty to develop innovative, interdisciplinary humanities teaching practices.

Across this grantmaking initiative, our support focuses on partnerships between universities and community colleges that have strong humanities leadership and share a commitment to successful transfer outcomes. Given the enormous size of the community college sector and the wide variety of collaborations between two- and four-year institutions, we seek to identify areas of intervention that can gain scale, financial support, and be replicated around the country.