The Texas Community College Education Initiative (TCCEI), established in 2003, serves as an extension of the TACC to promote the objectives of community college throughout the state. Some of those agendas include increasing community college enrollment and graduation, assisting graduates in gaining better rates of admission into the state's four-year universities and recognition programs for leaders in the community who have demonstrated a commitment to community college learning. The TCCEI administers five different programs to help accomplish these objectives as follows: STARLINK, Achieving the Dream, Early College High School, Nelson Award, and the Virtual College of Texas.
The TACC routinely conducts and publishes important research to track progress related to the organization's objectives and makes this research readily available to the public. Such research includes all public policy and legislation initiatives that impact community colleges; surveys to track enrollment, graduation and matriculation rates for students entering or exiting community college; surveys for tracking and tabulating admission fees and tuition fees for public community colleges; and tracking of tax revenues for all community college districts. In addition, the TACC conducts research to examine the economic contributions of community colleges to the state of Texas, as well as the types of degrees offered by community colleges and the impact of those degrees once earned.
The TACC website offers the public a complete archive of all activities conducted by the TACC and detailed explanations of all related TCCEI initiatives. Visitors to the website can click on the link for "Data and Info" and review all past research studies and review the results of those studies, while examining conclusions drawn by the TACC. The TACC also publishes a "Job Bank" on the website that lists all employment opportunities with each community college in the state of Texas.
The TACC invests heavily in distance learning initiatives in the state of Texas, with the objective of providing access to education and training to those who cannot attend community college on campus full-time. Through STARLINK, a TCCEI initiative, the TACC has linked all community colleges in the state through a satellite-based teleconference network. This allows community colleges to distribute programming and training to all types of public entities. The U.S. Distance Learning Association consistently rates STARLINK as one of the top three distance-learning networks in the nation.