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This practice brief addresses the financial insecurity faced by many community college students and provides recommendations for community college practitioners on how to use incentivized savings accounts to teach financial literacy and prepare students for financial challenges that may impact their educational future. Despite reactive attempts at creating on-campus food pantries, financial emergency funds, and financial literacy interventions, little research has addressed how community colleges can be proactive and help students avoid a financial crisis before it begins. This paper details how a large, urban community college took a proactive approach to these concerns and developed and implemented an incentivized student savings account program. The savings program encourages students to complete financial literacy tasks in exchange for account deposits, which could be used for future unanticipated expenses. Implications for program development, financial services practice, and future research are addressed.

Although case management in higher education is a relatively new phenomenon, the challenges presented by COVID-19 have forced many institutions to deliver emergency services in an extremely rapid fashion and adopt case management strategies to serve students in crisis. This case study shares how one large community college system developed a one-to-one (1-1) case management protocol prior to COVID to allow students to self-assess their needs to distribute emergency aid and resources in a personalized, contextualized, and resource-sensitive fashion. This study will introduce the case management protocol and student self-assessment as well as provide community college practitioners with the opportunity to adapt the model and the assessment to individual institutional contexts. Implications for research, practice, and policy will be addressed, in addition to providing practitioners resources for case management systems development.

On January 18th, 2018, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) required all federal aid-receiving institutions of higher education (Title IV) to publish web accessible websites for people with disabilities. To be compliant with federal law, Title IV institutions must now adhere to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 standards at the Level-A and Level-AA threshold. This study examined the web accessibility of a random sample of 325 two-year Title IV institutions in the United States and found all institutions had at least one Level-A error on their homepage, potentially violating new ADA guidelines. This study also found private, for-profit institutions published the least web accessible websites, while public institutions published the most web accessible websites. Implications for future research and practice are addressed.