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American Association of Community Colleges

About Plus 50 Initiative

About Plus 50 Initiative:   The Need  •  The Plus 50 Initiative  •  Year One Evaluation Results   •  Participating Community Colleges  •  Expansion  •  
Webinars  •  Funding for the Initiative

The Need

The 78 million baby boomers currently reaching retirement age represent a tremendous resource to the nation in terms of experience, skills, and leadership. To remain vital, the U.S. must fully leverage this population and help them to continue to lead engaged and purposeful lives. Thankfully, four out of five people over 50 say they will work in retirement — either full-time or part-time — some for personal fulfillment, others out of necessity. Baby boomers envision their retirement years as a melding of work, leisure, and self-improvement, but 62 percent wish they were better prepared for it.

The Plus 50 Initiative

The Plus 50 Initiative is conducted by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) to benchmark and showcase the most current and innovative programs at community colleges to engage the 50+ learner. Through the AACC Plus 50 Initiative community colleges create or expand campus programs to engage the 50+ population in learning; training or re-training programs; and volunteer, civic, or service activities.

Community colleges participate in the three-year grant program in learning teams. Demonstration Colleges are launching new programs for students in the 50 + population with the help of seed grants. They are aided with valuable expertise from five Mentor Colleges that already have established programs for students over the age of 50.

Plus 50 Initiative Year One Evaluation Results

The Plus 50 Initiative is a three-year effort to change the way programming and services are developed and implemented at community college for plus 50 learners. A significant contribution of the Initiative is informing other community colleges on the knowledge gained in order to advance expansion of Plus 50 programming to community colleges nationwide.

To assist in this effort, AACC engaged LFA Group as an independent, outside evaluator of the Plus 50 Initiative for the three-year period. LFA developed a mixed-method evaluation design to collect both quantitative and qualitative data to assess the initiative and support continuous improvements over the course of the three-years. Below are the Executive Summary and Year One Evaluation Report of the Plus 50 Initiative. LFA Group measured grantees colleges’ implementation progress, participant satisfaction, and captured lessons learned and promising practices in the first year of the initiative. LFA’s report captures implementation successes and challenges and provides information on factors contributing to the success of the Plus 50 Initiative in year one to facilitate program implementation or standards of excellence for use by other community colleges.

Plus 50: Year One Evaluation Report

The Plus 50 Initiative: Executive Summary of the Year One Evaluation Report

Participating Community Colleges

Demonstration Colleges receiving grants are:

Mentor colleges receiving grants are:

Expansion

The AACC Plus 50 Initiative has expanded beyond the original grantee colleges to include additional community colleges. Reflecting changing economic circumstances for many older workers who thought they were poised for retirement but now must remain on the job, the expansion focused specifically on the Initiative's training, retraining and career development area.

The expansion paired existing and more experienced Plus 50 colleges as learning partners with dozens more community colleges that became "affiliates" of the Plus 50 Initiative.

Other experienced colleges participated in the expansion of AACC's Plus 50 Initiative as regional conference hosts:

Century College hosted a regional conference titled "Get Ready to Engage Plus 50 Learners." Sixty-seven continuing education and workforce development professionals from nine community and technical colleges in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area joined their "learning partner," Century College, to create plans to implement workforce training and re-training programming for plus 50 students.

Three Plus 50 Initiative community colleges in Washington - Clark College, Clover Park Technical College and Community Colleges of Spokane - hosted a regional conference involving community colleges from the surrounding Washington and Oregon area to form partnerships and disseminate lessons learned from their own Plus 50 programming. Sixty-two representatives from over 20 Washington and Oregon community colleges attended the Northwest Region Plus 50 Initiative conference. The conference featured new ways to reach and teach Plus 50 learners.

Richland College in Dallas, Texas, hosted a Plus 50 Initiative Texas Expansion Conference focused on how to start a Plus 50 Initiative program, involving as many as 11 Texas community colleges. These colleges share regional concerns and have similar economic and educational demographics that make them ideal partners in expanding opportunities for plus 50 students. The conference focused on collaboration between departments; marketing and promotion; obtaining college leadership support; stakeholders; appropriate teaching styles; programs that work; and program challenges.

Three additional community colleges are serving as Plus 50 Initiative Peer-to-Peer Ambassadors expanding the network of Plus 50 colleges by reaching out to additional community colleges. This peer learning initiative provides a structured dialogue among community colleges' representatives to share knowledge on starting and sustaining quality educational programs for plus 50 students

St. Louis Community College is serving as a Plus 50 Initiative Peer-to-Peer Ambassador with fellow member institutions in the Missouri Community College Association and three community colleges in Illinois.

Clark College in Vancouver, Wash. is serving as a Plus 50 Initiative Peer-to-Peer Ambassador for the seven community colleges in Washington and Oregon.

Joliet Junior College is serving as a Plus 50 Peer-to-Peer Ambassador for three other Illinois and one Michigan community college.

Webinars

Also as part of the expansion the AACC Plus 50 Initiative hosted a series of six webinars. More than 300 administrators and faculty from 96 community colleges across the country participated in the live webinars, representing a wide range of campus divisions: workforce development, continuing education, communications and marketing, program operations, and community development. Click here for the Plus 50 Webinar recordings and PowerPoint presentations.

Three upcoming webinars will be offered to all community colleges at no cost later this year.

Funding for the Initiative

The initiative is funded with a $3.2 million dollar grant from The Atlantic Philanthropies (www.atlanticphilanthropies.org).