More NC community colleges are moving to 8-week terms. Here’s why

Community colleges play a crucial role in driving workforce development and economic mobility. Yet in North Carolina, just 49% of community college students complete a credential, transfer, or are still enrolled after four years.

In the 2021-22 school year, when leaders at Isothermal Community College disaggregated student success measures like course pass rates and on-time graduation rates by subgroup, equity gaps appeared — in particular, part-time, adult, and working students were falling behind.

As Isothermal leaders began researching how other community colleges across the country were working to improve retention and completion, Texas caught their eye. There, community colleges were increasingly redesigning traditional 16-week semesters into two accelerated eight-week terms, and the results were promising.

At the time, Isothermal offered fewer than 7% of courses in an eight-week format. Drawing on external research, peer examples, and institutional data analysis, college leaders decided to implement eight-week terms at scale.

When students enrolled in the fall 2023 semester, 82% of courses at Isothermal were offered in an eight-week format — with students typically taking a full courseload of two classes each term. 

Often dubbed “Great in 8,” what started at one North Carolina community college has since gained significant momentum. This fall, at least 11 colleges across the state are operating a majority of their courses on eight-week terms.

Shortened or accelerated academic terms are also taking hold nationally — an Achieving the Dream initiative is supporting 16 colleges across Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia in adopting them, and the California Community College system received funding from Ascendium Education Group to implement and study shortened courses.

“I think that North Carolina is really at the tip of the sword on this,” said Sarah Deal, director of research at the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research. “We are about two years ahead in North Carolina, particularly from a statewide standpoint, but even from the kinds of research questions that we’re asking.”

The Belk Center and the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) are leading research on the implementation and impact of accelerated terms across the state. In a quasi-experimental study conducted by the Belk Center that compared student outcomes before and after eight-week terms were implemented at Isothermal to outcomes at a similar peer college, student retention increased by 5 percentage points and course pass rates increased by 4 percentage points.

Why accelerated terms?

Community college students face a variety of obstacles that may hinder their success, stemming from demands inside and outside of the classroom. Compared to students at four-year colleges, community colleges serve a larger proportion of students of color, first-generation students, low-income students, adult students, and first- or second-generation immigrants.

“When students don’t persist … it’s not because they weren’t smart enough to pass the class. It’s because their childcare fell through … or their hours changed at work and there was nothing they could do about it,” said Dr. Vern Lindquist, president of Johnston Community College, which implemented eight-week terms in fall 2026. “The chances of that happening in an eight-week semester versus a 16-week semester is just really simple math — it’s 50% less likely to happen.”

Eight-week courses can provide students with greater flexibility and increase their academic momentum as they focus on fewer courses at a time, complete courses more quickly, and have more frequent on-ramps to take the courses they need. That can be particularly valuable for community college students who are balancing work, childcare, and other responsibilities outside of the classroom.

“Instead of three times a year, counting summer, that I can come into the college, now I’ve got five,” said Dr. Greg Thomas, the former vice president for academic and student affairs at Isothermal. “If I’m dropping out of two classes because something comes up in my life, that’s better than dropping out of four. Plus, since I can come back in the next eight weeks, I can make that up a lot faster than having to wait until the next semester.”

But successfully implementing eight-week terms at scale requires much more than a scheduling change — it prompts colleges to rethink everything they do, from registration to advising to financial aid.

“The colleges that have really pioneered this across our system are huge advocates for it, and they’ve all seen a lot of success on their campuses,” said Emily Smail, director of research and evaluation at the NCCCS. “But I think that there is still some reason to be cautious, and it is a huge investment for colleges … with how much redesign it takes at every level.”

How accelerated terms prompt whole-college redesign

After the decision was made to implement eight-week terms at Isothermal, the first and natural focus was on course scheduling. But that decision quickly prompted the college to rethink everything it did from the business office to maintenance. 

“What we didn’t figure out until later in the process was that it takes changes at every office,” said Thomas. “The schedule on which everything operates is different. Realistically, it was about working with every office to figure out how the change affected them and trying to make adjustments.”

First, the admissions office and registrar needed a way to accept applications, enroll students, and register them for courses more times throughout the school year than the traditional fall, spring, and summer terms. Financial aid staff had to determine how to disperse funding for eight-week courses, including figuring out what happens if a student awarded aid enrolls in the first eight-week term of the semester and doesn’t enroll in the second eight-week term.

In student services, advisers had to learn when courses were offered and in what sequences. Ideally, students have more opportunities to take the courses they need under eight-week terms, but coordination is needed to map and communicate new pathways.

“You can’t just have one (advising) meeting at the beginning when they come in, set it, and forget it,” said Lindquist. “Every eight weeks, things are happening, so there are going to be more touch points with students, more opportunities for them to restart if they stumble.”

For faculty, implementing eight-week courses requires reevaluating learning outcomes and redesigning curriculum, assignments, classroom activities, and teaching practices to align with those outcomes.

“Many of the courses that I designed many years ago didn’t change a whole heck of a lot. And I think sometimes you really do need to stand back and say, ‘Wait a minute, if I were going to build this course from scratch today, what would it look like?’” said Lindquist, who previously taught at a community college for 18 years.

As the Belk Center studies the early impacts of implementing eight-week terms, Deal acknowledges that this whole-college redesign process may also contribute to improved student outcomes.

“Part of me is curious about whether it is the eight weeks that is resulting in increased student success, where we see it, or if it’s actually just the process of rethinking every system and policy at the college that is the thing that is helping students,” Deal said. “Colleges are having to be really intentional about all those decisions that perhaps before were just on autopilot. Either way, those could be good things.”

Managing change: Advice from colleges on shifting to eight-week terms

While many colleges already offer eight-week terms during the summer, shifting the majority of courses to eight-week terms requires a huge amount of change.

When Johnston Community College made the decision to move to eight-week terms, Lindquist met with students, faculty, and staff who were understandably concerned. He knew it would be a heavy lift to implement.

“We live in very uncertain times … and the change is coming at you from all angles,” he said. 

But the potential for eight-week terms to improve outcomes for Johnston’s students, as colleges in Texas had done, was too promising not to try.

“As far as outcomes for the students, I don’t know if there’s anything a college could do that would cost less and that would do more,” Lindquist said.

Define the challenge you’re trying to solve

Before making the decision to implement eight-week terms, colleges need to have a good sense of their outcomes data and the exact problems they are trying to address, Deal said. For example, if a college’s goal is to increase enrollment, eight-week terms may not be the solution.

“If the goal is to decrease time to completion, and colleges have a really good understanding of their data, that will probably help them,” Deal said.

At Johnston, Lindquist started by articulating the potential win for the college — increasing retention and graduation rates. Acknowledging there would be challenges, he focused on the goal. 

“If we do this, look what this is going to do for our students,” he said. “The goals here are so good that it’s worth the trouble.”

Learn from colleges that have gone first

As more North Carolina community colleges implemented eight-week terms, college leaders expressed an interest in formal opportunities to learn from one another. 

From there, the Belk Center launched its inaugural Great in 8 Community of Practice, bringing together leaders from 17 colleges that were designing, implementing, or scaling accelerated terms. Colleges that had already implemented eight-week terms served as mentors to other mentee colleges still in the design phase, creating an opportunity for support and knowledge-sharing. The Belk Center provided backbone support to the effort, including presentations on data and research findings.

At Johnston, Lindquist said learning from peer colleges that went first has been invaluable. During a campus visit from the Isothermal team, faculty and staff at Johnston were connected with their counterparts at Isothermal who held the same jobs — allowing them to address role-specific questions and concerns.

“Margaret drove across the darn state and brought all of her people to help us,” he said, referring to Isothermal President Dr. Margaret Annunziata. “I would do the same thing — I would drive to the farthest-flung place in the country if I thought I could help a college.”

Nationally, Achieving the Dream updated its companion guide for shortened academic terms in 2026, offering case studies, tools, and insights from colleges that have piloted or scaled eight-week terms.

Ensure alignment with K-12 partners

For both Johnston and Isothermal, local school district leaders initially had concerns about the college’s plans to move to eight-week terms. 

Dual enrollment students who take community college classes while still in high school were of particular concern — how would they navigate 16-week high school courses and eight-week college courses simultaneously? 

For both colleges, meeting with K-12 partners regularly and discussing how the terms would be implemented and what the potential benefits were helped bring them on board. Now, Isothermal meets quarterly with leaders from the two school districts the college serves, and “their attitude has totally shifted,” Thomas said, adding that success rates have increased for dual enrollment students since eight-week terms were implemented.

Create a transition team to guide the process

After the decision was made to implement eight-week terms, both Johnston and Isothermal created a transition or “pulse” team — consisting of faculty and staff from different departments, including those who were resistant to the idea — to create an open feedback channel.

At Isothermal, leaders met with the pulse team regularly to discuss what questions and concerns they were hearing from the campus community.

“Just come to us and tell us what’s wrong. They didn’t have an assignment to find a solution or anything — it was just, be the pulse,” said Thomas.

Move to scale quickly, with a process for exemptions

The urge to start with a limited pilot of eight-week terms may be tempting, but leaders at both Johnston and Isothermal said moving to scale as quickly as possible was vital for successful implementation.

Both colleges defaulted to all courses moving to eight-week terms and created a process for faculty to request an exemption. Notably, roughly 20% of classes at both institutions are still offered in traditional 16-week terms — but a piecemeal approach can prevent colleges from engaging in the full redesign efforts necessary to implement eight-week terms well, leaders said. 

Courses that have a high number of contact hours, cover a large swath of content, or rely on the passage of time — such as plant growth or child development — are often exempted and remain as 16-week courses, Deal said.

At Isothermal, faculty had the option to submit an exemption form on a class-by-class basis, explaining why eight-weeks didn’t make sense for that particular course.

“I didn’t turn down a single (exemption) request,” Thomas said. “Because they took the time to explain why it didn’t make sense in the teaching of their class — they’re the experts.”

Johnston developed a course exemption rubric that considered what peer institutions were doing, what research said, the number of contact and lab hours for the course, and other factors.

“When we first started, we were kind of trying to just ease into it,” said Carrie Pitts-Densmore, vice president of enrollment and marketing at Johnston. “But I think had we not gone all in, we actually wouldn’t have thought about all these questions at once.” 

Beyond the imperative to try to improve student outcomes as quickly as possible, Lindquist said implementing eight-week terms at scale also prevents students from overloading their schedule with a combination of eight- and 16-week courses.

“The eight-week thing works if it’s all eight-week,” he said. “If you don’t have the critical mass to make it possible for students to get the classes they need all in the same modality, then you’re just setting yourself up to fail.” 

Communicate the change early and often

As with any big change on a college campus, moving to eight-week terms requires a great deal of communication with faculty, staff, and students.

“Presidents and the leadership need to be letting everyone on the campus know what’s coming and how it’s going to affect them,” Deal said. “It needs to be regular and often and clear in what the colleges are communicating.”

At Johnston, leaders held frequent meetings and listening tours to communicate the change and gather feedback. Importantly, leaders weren’t asking: Should we do this? But instead asking: How do you think we should go about doing this?

One common misconception among students was that eight-week terms would still require them to take five classes at once — effectively doubling their course load — rather than taking only two or three courses at a time. Johnston now has a 124-page booklet with sample eight-week schedules for 40 different programs, and the chatbot on the college’s website is also trained on this information, helping students find answers to their questions more quickly.

“When we went through this process to figure out what people did want to know, the visualization of it (eight-week terms) was really, really important to our faculty, staff, and students,” Pitts-Densmore said. “Once they could see it, I think everybody kind of took a deep breath.”

Reflecting on Isothermal’s implementation of eight-week courses, Thomas said he wished they had engaged students earlier. Students who were returning to the college for the second year of their program were particularly nervous and unhappy about the change. The college created an informational booklet with answers to frequently asked questions — but students often wouldn’t have their specific question answered by that resource, Thomas said. 

To gather student feedback, Isothermal added several questions to end-of-course evaluations, which are typically completed by 70-80% of students. At the end of the first eight-week term, most students said they would recommend an eight-week course to other students. 

Talking to students who withdrew from courses and cited eight-week terms as a barrier, and to students who had concerns about financial aid or other logistics, was also a valuable source of feedback.

“‘Good job,’ is nice feedback, but, ‘This didn’t work for me,’ is better feedback, because we can correct for it for future students,” Thomas said.

Provide professional development and support for faculty and staff

Rather than working to build buy-in for the idea of eight-week courses at Isothermal, Thomas said the college worked to build shared ownership.

“We need to make decisions and move in directions together,” he said. “People will say, ‘Yep, I’ll do whatever it takes to make it work,’ but the truth is, if we don’t have a plan for how it’s going to work — that optimism is appreciated — but it doesn’t help the students when we get to a problem.”

At both Isothermal and Johnston, faculty members were paid a stipend for successfully completing a short class that required them to redesign a course they teach. At Johnston, faculty members selected one course to work on and started with a backwards design pedagogy where they first identified learning outcomes and then redesigned course components to meet those outcomes.

It’s also critical to support staff, which both colleges primarily did by connecting them with peers at other institutions — registrars speaking to other registrars, admissions staff speaking to other admissions staff. In hindsight, Thomas recommends offering more formal, paid professional development opportunities for staff, similar to those provided to faculty.

“The difference was, ‘I feel like someone’s investing in me to do this work,’” Thomas said of the paid course for faculty. “And we should’ve offered that for others as well.”

Improving outcomes at Isothermal

As soon as the first eight-week term ended at Isothermal, the college began analyzing data and sharing it back with faculty, including head count, course success rates, withdrawal rates, and course evaluations.

“We didn’t know how it was going to turn out. But we said, ‘We’re going to show it to you no matter what,’” Thomas said.

A lot of faculty expected to see students struggling with the initial switch to eight-week terms. But that wasn’t the case, Thomas said. In just the first eight-week term, course success rates had increased from the previous fall. 

Some were skeptical of the data at first, but Thomas emphasized that improved success rates could be stemming from a number of changes. Students had fewer classes to focus on at once, and the courses they were taking were freshly redesigned.

“You reevaluated every course, you looked at the content, you looked at whether it still made sense, and how you got to the outcomes you were trying to get to, so that was a big part of it, too,” he said.

In 18 out of 19 student demographic groups at Isothermal — including race, gender, age range, dual-enrollment status, and Pell Grant eligibility — outcomes are improving, Thomas said. And demographic groups that experienced equity gaps before eight-week terms were implemented are seeing even greater improvement than those that were already performing well.

The Belk Center’s study provides further evidence of the improvements Isothermal is seeing, finding that “compressed academic courses at the college led to increased student success” — including an increase in first-year student retention, credit momentum, and course pass rates, as well as a reduction in course withdrawal rates. 

“Taken together, these significant measures are key indicators of positive progress towards credentials for students; students are staying enrolled and succeeding in the compressed academic courses in which they have enrolled,” the study reads.

“We want to see more students being served by the college, we want to see them taking more classes that they’re successful in, so they can progress,” Thomas said. “And then we want to see them graduate and get good paying jobs, because that’s the end goal of all of this — to make their lives better.”

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Editor’s note: Dr. Margaret Annunziata serves on EdNC’s Board of Directors.