The ASHE Reader on Community Colleges serves as the seminal collection of Readers providing sound, wide-ranging, sought after works exploring the multitude of facets of two-year colleges. The Community College Reader has been a central resource and primary text in graduate programs countrywide offering courses and programs in community college leadership and higher education administration. In the years since the publication of the third edition in 2006, there have been numerous advances in leadership approaches, theoretical and conceptual frameworks, and empirical studies regarding community colleges, their constituents, and related outcomes.

The body of research produced during the release of the current edition is vast and rich. The corpus of extant literature available in the fourth edition provides readers with a compendium of works that underscore the historical significance and contemporary importance of American community colleges. This collection blends theory and practice in describing the status, scope and effectiveness of services, programs, policies, and best practices in community college education that appeal to practitioners, intellectuals and scholars-in-training. The fourth edition continues the tradition of prior Readers to include historical antecedents, classical models, and traditional frameworks germane to community colleges. In addition, this edition will maintain the custom of including research that seamlessly weaves the classics and foundations while offering contemporary synthesis of the two-year collegiate context.

The fourth edition of the ASHE Reader on Community Colleges contains a plethora of works that illuminate historical foundations, theoretical perspectives, institutional diversity, campus climate, organization, administrative leadership, and finance. In addition, the community college faculty and students, career-technical education, workforce education, remediation, transfer, globalization, technology, and policy issues. In sum, the fourth edition of the ASHE Reader on Community Colleges is a valuable resource for scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and who study American higher education, especially two-year institutions of higher learning.

Eboni Zamani-Gallaher is a professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership in the College of Education and Co-Principal Investigator on the Illinois Community College Board grant at OCCRL. Her research centers on access and collegiate experiences of marginalized students at two- and four-year institutions of higher education.