The Aspen Prize -- One Million Dollars Awarded to Community Colleges

Valencia College, Florida takes top honors of the first offering of the Aspen Prize as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 
http://chronicle.com/article/Valencia-College-Wins-First/130091/?sid=cc&utm_source=cc&utm_medium=en                                             (This link requires authentication for off-campus use.)
As noted on the Aspen Institute website: "The purpose of the Aspen Prize is to recognize community colleges with outstanding academic and workforce outcomes in both absolute performance and improvements over time. By focusing on student success and lifting up models that work, the Aspen Prize will honor excellence, stimulate innovation, and create benchmarks for measuring progress."  This link further describes the prize:
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/aspen-prize/about  
The Aspen Institute website has profiles of the ten finalists selected for the total million dollar prize. Each profile highlights a strategy that focuses on reducing the risk for at-risk students, mainly in developmental education, but quite a few in career/technical programs and industry partnerships.
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/aspen-prize/finalists
A total of 120 eligible colleges were selected during the competition using an analytic model drawn from IPEDS data described below. You can see the data dashboards in the pdf version of the Round 1 Model Description. Sad to say, no colleges in New Jersey were deemed eligible.
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/aspen-prize/eligibleinstitutions 
The evaluative rubric used gives shows the criteria deemed important by the Aspen Institute:  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27262972/Round%20One%20Model%20Description.pdf