The “college preparation gap” among students graduating from high school is real and persistent. There are some signs that it has been stabilizing in recent years, but the fact remains that too many—arguably even most—holders of high school diplomas aren’t ready for college-level work. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the realm of community college, where 68 percent of students require at least some form of remedial coursework (also known as “developmental education”) just to get to square one. Perhaps four-year colleges should face facts and refuse to admit students who aren’t ready, but we’re not there yet. For better or worse, community colleges have their doors wide open when it comes to “underprepared” students who still want to give college a go. But do they have their eyes similarly wide open? Two recent reports highlight the good, the bad, and the ugly among community colleges’ efforts to build successful students via remediation.
First up, a report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) surveying approximately seventy thousand students from more than 150 of its institutions across the country. The vast majority (86 percent) of the incoming students surveyed believed that they were academically prepared to succeed at their college; yet 68 percent of those same students reported placing into at least one developmental education class. Despite their belief in their own readiness, most who took the remedial placements indicated that the material was, in fact, appropriate for their skill level. The report cites the National Student Clearinghouse’s college completions report from late 2015, which showed that just 39 percent of degree-seeking, first-time-in-college students earn a degree or certificate within six years—with or without remediation. To combat these odds, CCCSE calls for a “remediation revolution” comprising a number of research-based options. One of those is greater collaboration with high schools (e.g., curriculum alignment, advising/mentoring, dual-credit offerings), with evidence provided from a new program in the Goose Creek, Texas school district that aims to align education pathways from pre-K through college graduation.
Interestingly, new research in the current issue of the Journal of Higher Education also examines remediation in Texas colleges (six community colleges and two four-year colleges). Specifically, the research investigates whether the institutions’ Developmental Summer Bridge Program (DSBP) helped recent high school graduates in need of remediation increase their persistence in college, credit accumulation, and course completion. The DSBP included 4–5 weeks of accelerated instruction in remedial coursework, student supports, instruction in the “soft skills” required for college success, and a $400 stipend for successful completion of the program. The control group was left to its own devices over the summer, and while many students took advantage of traditional summer brush-up courses, most simply enrolled in the fall in their assigned remedial classes. The treatment group, meanwhile, showed only “modest positive impacts in the short term” from the intensive DSBP, all of which had dissipated in a year.
Since P-16 alignment is still an unproven strategy, and summer tune-ups like DBSP have barely registered effects, what else remains in the community college toolbox? CCCSE suggests three other strategies to bust the remediation boom. First is using multiple measures to determine placement for incoming students rather than a single test. Evidence for this one comes from North Carolina, which adopted the policy for all community colleges in 2013 (mandatory compliance is due in fall 2016). Davidson County Community College got a head start and has already seen fewer remedial placements and more student success in credit-bearing courses by using a mix of unweighted GPA and high school transcript data, especially in math courses/grades. A second strategy is eliminating “cold” sittings for placement tests. Washington State Community College in Marietta, Ohio mandates compulsory brush-up sessions for students before taking placement tests, and Passaic County Community College in New Jersey offers a sample online placement test and video tutorials to keep students from being surprised by the rigor of the test. Both schools have seen reduced remedial placements. Third is co-requisite remediation—that is, students simultaneously attending a remedial and a credit-bearing course in the same subject. No one’s talking about the cost of this—a common bugbear with remediation—but the data from a startup program at Butler Community College in Kansas is nothing to sneeze at.
As Pennsylvania State University’s Sean Trainor put it a while back, “Community colleges have been at the forefront of nearly every major development in higher education.” They are also the canaries in the coal mine of higher education, it seems, as the remediation boom is making an even bigger noise in two-year colleges than in their four-year counterparts. Let’s hope that one or more of these efforts—along with higher standards for K–12—can dampen the boom for good.
SOURCE: Center for Community College Student Engagement, “Expectations Meet Reality: The Underprepared Student and Community Colleges,” February 2016.
SOURCE: Heather Wathington, Joshua Pretlow, and Elisabeth Barnett, “A Good Start? The Impact of Texas’ Developmental Summer Bridge Program on Student Success,” The Journal of Higher Education (March/April 2016).
