Chapter 6: Not Just a March to Tenure and Promotion: Faculty Careers at a Community College

Full-time faculty often struggle to balance responsibilities, a problem particularly relevant to new faculty on tenure-track lines (Larson et al., 2019; Stupnisky et al., 2017) and at community colleges (Sallee, 2008), where the proportion of non-white students is 11 percentage points higher than in four-year institutions (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019b). Engaging students of diverse backgrounds is imperative in these colleges, but many faculty across higher education lacked graduate school training in this area (Behar-Horenstein et al., 2016; Cassuto, 2017; Elliott & Oliver, 2016). Research on community or ‘two-year’ colleges (CCs) suggests that support for teaching sustains faculty job satisfaction (Lyons & Akroyd, 2014). With nearly half of U.S. college students enrolled in CCs before the COVID-19 pandemic (American Association of Community Colleges, 2016), improving the faculty experience affects the futures of millions of economically- and socially disadvantaged students who attend these schools.