ACT Honors League for Innovation

July 2, 1998

Iowa City, Iowa—ACT, Inc. has honored the League for Innovation, on the occasion of the League’s 30th anniversary, as a force for change in higher education. ACT officials presented the league an award for its dedication to improving community colleges through innovation, experimentation, and institutional transformation.

The League for Innovation is a consortium of some 1,400 community colleges throughout the United States and Canada. It has been instrumental in promoting significant advances, including the recent emergence of community colleges as leaders in workforce and economic development at the community level.

"The key to workforce development is overcoming barriers to communication between employers and educators," said Don Carstensen, ACT vice president for educational services, "and community colleges play a crucial role in lowering those barriers."

According to Carstensen, management speaks of costs, training dollars and return on investment, while educators and students speak in terms of academic accomplishment or course credit, and employees talk in terms of tasks, respect and job security, while their human resources departments speak in terms of culture, fairness and partnerships.

"Community colleges give all of these parties the ability to communicate their concerns in a language that each of the other parties can understand and work with," Carstensen said. "That cooperation is the key to success for workforce development programs."

ACT is the Iowa City-based organization that sponsors the ACT Assessment college-entrance program and WorkKeys, the nation’s first comprehensive workforce development system. ACT has enrolled over 200 U.S. and Canadian community colleges as WorkKeys Service Centers, which serve as focal points for job analysis, testing and training services for local employers.