The goal in developing this ASHE Reader was to provide a contextualized picture of community colleges, having their own history, their own place within the contemporary higher education system, and their own future trajectory. These selections of readings do not place community colleges on a pedestal, nor do they attempt to condemn. They offer a rich array of perspectives, theoretical frameworks and research-based evidence drawn from quantitative and qualitative investigations to give readers a fuller understanding of these distinctive and increasingly pivotal institutions of higher education. This Reader is different from any other ASHE Reader because it focuses on a specific institutional type--the community college. One of the reasons this book is so necessary is because other readers that focus on higher education generally include few selections on community colleges, despite their enormous contribution to the higher education enterprise in the U.S. and their growing importance internationally. Thus, this Reader on community colleges is an important means to convey information about this institution to higher education scholars as well as practitioners. This book is designed for two major audiences: (1) faculty and graduate students in courses that focus on the community college, and (2) individual scholars and practitioners who are interested in an overview of the community college. Masterrs"s and doctoral programs for general higher education administrators, community college faculty and administrators, and student affairs administrators can use the Reader to supplement various higher education courses. For the second group of individual scholars and practitioners, scholars new to the study of community colleges can learn about major issues dominating the study of community colleges and the diverse perspectives from which the institutions are viewed. Practitioners such as members of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT), and community college faculty and administrators can use the book to become acquainted with current research on the institutions in which they work. They can benefit from reading and understanding the wide range of perspectives associated with community colleges, from highly critical to neutral to complimentary. They can understand and appreciate more fully that not all research finds fault with the community college nor is the research consistently laudatory.