| By Gale Staff |
One of the key issues facing community colleges is not just getting students in the classroom—but helping them to succeed once they’re there. Nearly half of students drop out within a year, and only 40% complete a degree or certificate within six years.
According to a 2023 study from New America, having to work was the top reason (49%) that students stopped attending, with financial pressures coming in second (31%) and lost motivation (27%) rounding out the top three. While these represent real and very complicated societal issues, there is a growing belief that community colleges must do more to demonstrate their value to students, including through providing a clearer path forward that connects students with industry needs.
In a move to address this, nearly 400 community colleges see significant promise in guided pathways, a concept piloted by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) with positive results. While guided pathways are malleable to individual institutional needs, here is how Chris Tombari, director of strategic initiatives at the Community College of Aurora, outlines the four essential pillars of guided pathways for community colleges:
- Create a clearly defined path toward a degree or certificate
- Help students choose their best path
- Keep students focused on completing their path using wraparound services
- Ensure students are learning while studying within their path
Wherever your institution is at in the implementation of a guided pathways program, Gale Research Complete is a critical tool that will help connect your institution’s mission with your students’ goals. Designed to meet the needs of community colleges’ tight budgets, Gale Research Complete offers subscription-based content for in-demand career paths—including allied health, the automotive industry, and business.
Gale Research Complete: A Dynamic Tool for Diverse Needs
As America’s “open-door institution,” community colleges serve a wide range of needs. Our subscription-based model is designed with an understanding of budget limitations while remaining focused on delivering a broad collection of materials to address students’ diverse learning styles and academic interests.
Gale Research Complete provides a solution to your institution’s multidisciplinary research needs, offering more than thirteen million pages of historical primary sources, 2.5 million items of literary criticism and full-text works, 48,000 periodicals, and 4,000 eBook volumes, including award-winning encyclopedias and directories.
Gale Research Complete has the elasticity to support students wherever they’re at, and whatever their background. This includes dual-enrollment high school students working ahead toward a bachelor’s degree, full-time students preparing to transfer to a four-year institution, first-generation learners, and students working toward career readiness with a two-year program or certificate.
We also offer a growing number of Spanish-language content to support the more than forty million Americans who are native Spanish speakers. Plus, content can be translated into more than thirty additional languages. To support the growing number of students using text-to-speech, integrated ReaderSpeaker technology allows users to download and save audio files to their mobile devices in more than twenty languages, meeting the different learning needs of students.
Career-Focused Resources
Tom Brock, director of the Community College Research Center, says, “They [community colleges] need to demonstrate that students can come in and earn a credential with value in the labor market within a reasonable period of time. Historically, these have been trouble spots for community colleges.”
Many students who enroll in community college are looking for a direct path to employment. Gale Research Complete provides broad access to in-demand materials for students on their path forward. This includes support for online, hybrid, and in-person learning, with a wealth of digital library resources, tools, and services available wherever your students are learning.
Gale Research Complete builds a direct connection between library investment and positive student outcomes as you help prepare your student body to achieve their academic goals and skill development on their path to career readiness. To simplify the student experience, the Gale Research Complete home page offers research guidance, cross-search enhancement to discover materials across databases, and video tutorials to lessen the burden on staff while empowering your campus to make full use of the available resources.
Gale Health and Wellness
Gale Health and Wellness provides access to authoritative, full-text medical journals, magazines, reference works, multimedia, and much more on a full range of health-related issues, from current disease and disorder information to in-depth coverage of alternative medical practices.
Gale Business: Insights
Industry is demanding career-ready graduates. There is no better way for your students to prepare than Gale Business: Insights. This database provides access to more than 440,000 detailed company profiles, including financial data. Students can also find in-depth country overviews and comprehensive industry profiles to stay current with the ever-evolving business landscape.
Gale Business: Entrepreneurship
America is a nation of entrepreneurs, and community colleges are uniquely positioned to help get new business ideas off the ground. Gale Business: Entrepreneurship is an indispensable tool for students as they walk through planning, funding, starting, and managing a business, while offering resources for hot topics like accounting, management, marketing, and more.
ChiltonLibrary
In 2024, auto manufacturing jobs hit a thirty-four-year high in the United States. Connect your students with ChiltonLibrary, the premier resource for vehicle maintenance, repair, and technical service bulletins for most years, makes, and models.
Prepare Dual-Enrollment and Transfer Students for Their Next Move
A huge number of those enrolled in community colleges are dual-enrollment high school students and those planning to transfer to four-year institutions.
Data from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University shows that nearly 1.8 million high school students were dual-enrolled in community colleges over the 2022–23 school year. In states like Idaho and Indiana, more than half of those attending community colleges are high school students.
Available through your Gale Research Complete subscription, Archives Unbound can help prepare students for the demands of future coursework. With its collection of more than 300,000 documents of primary and secondary sources, Archives Unbound is uniquely positioned to ready students for the rigorous demands of information literacy. This is a great introduction for students to prepare themselves for research-heavy courses across a range of disciplines, using the same materials that they will be working with at four-year institutions. Plus, citation tools are integrated directly into the user workflow, acclimating students to documentation across a range of styles, including APA, Chicago, and MLA.
Let’s Get Started: Contact Your Gale Rep Today
For decades, Gale has partnered with community colleges across the United States to deliver the resources that faculty, librarians, and students need to accomplish their learning goals. We are proud to continue partnering with you today as your institution continues the critical work of evolving to deliver results for students’ educational and career goals.
If you’re interested in learning more, contact your Gale rep—we would love to connect and learn more about how we can help.
