Community College Men of Color Initiatives (CCMCIs) are increasingly popular strategies utilized to promote retention and completion among Men of Color (MOC). CCMCI directors offer a unique positionality in understanding how their identities, institutional contexts, and power dynamics affect their design of programs and participating students. Using a critical phenomenological approach, the authors of this study explore the lived experiences of CCMCI directors in conceptualizing, implementing, and assessing these initiatives.

Community colleges increasingly implement various student success programs, including 1st-year seminars, college skills courses, learning communities, and orientation, in an effort to boost degree completion. However, it is unclear how success programs’ curricular designs may contribute to these and associated student outcomes. Such inquiry is limited, in part, by the lack of methodological frameworks for program impact heterogeneity research. This study proposes a new conceptualization of nominally different student success programs as instances of a broader activity, which also provides a way to operationalize their curricular structures in comparable ways. Second, to briefly illustrate this approach, the study leverages matched program and student data to investigate how variations in student engagement—an emergent intermediate outcome for fostering successful college going—are related to variation in program design. Findings reveal that structural and underutilized curricular elements may be more impactful than skills-based curricula that are typically the organizing focus of these programs.

Objective: Beyond understanding whether first-year student success interventions in community colleges are effective—for which there is mixed evidence in the literature—this study’s purpose was to uncover how they work to realize observed outcomes, including at times unanticipated undesirable outcomes. Method: This qualitative multiple case study used cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) to unpack interactions and tensions among programmatic-level features and individual-level experiences and actions. We conducted classroom observation, document analysis, and interviews with instructors and students in four student success courses across diverse contexts. Results: Regardless of particular designs and course emphases, we found in all cases a blurring of activity elements, wherein learning tools and learning goals were often coterminous, or instructors effectively took on the role of learning tools themselves, in the form of object lessons and mediators, for instance. Courses had a distinctive character as rehearsal for college that simultaneously created a welcoming peer environment but an uncertain learning and assessment environment. Contributions: Because of their nature as metacourses—college courses about college-going—success courses’ means and ends ultimately may be functionally inseparable, thus helping to explain their continual evolution and contested roles. Whereas such courses are typically justified as means to teach college skills, we found this utilitarian rationale to be insufficient to describe the experiential dimensions of social learning that participants reported. Instead, we found these courses reveal how college-going is an emergent social literacy, one that a single course is insufficient to fully realize.