Remedial courses can soak up time and money (with often poor results), but federal reports show that up to 65 percent of community college students have taken at least one remedial course within six years of enrolling. A recent study examines the outcomes of a change in the way remedial education in community colleges has been offered in the last decade and whether that change has been beneficial for students who need help getting up to speed.
The traditional remediation model in higher education mandates that students who are below college-ready thresholds—typically measured by ACT, SAT, or Accuplacer scores—pass a sequence of up to three prerequisite courses before they can enroll in college-level, credit-bearing coursework. That is, non-credit-bearing work has to be completed satisfactorily (and at full tuition prices) before students can shed the “remedial” course prefix and begin earning credits toward a degree. This turned out to be an ineffective model, in part because there were high attrition rates (due to lack of preparedness, time, cost, or all three) and many complaints that the remedial courses didn’t actually prepare students all that well for college-level course content.
So, in recent years, more than twenty states have adopted corequisite models, which allow remedial students to take college-level courses at the same time that they are taking courses that provide them with academic support connected to that college-level course. The idea is that the student is getting “just in time” support that may be more beneficial than building up skills through a prerequisite sequence of remedial courses that takes much longer to complete (and comes without the benefit of credit attainment). In the new model, the earning of college credits starts immediately for both the college-level course and the remedial course that is concurrently preparing students for it.
The study takes place in Tennessee, which was the first higher education system—starting in 2015—to replace a standalone prerequisite sequence with a corequisite model for all incoming students. The analysts mostly use a difference-in-differences model to compare the two types of remediation. They contrast outcomes for remedial-eligible students before and after implementation of the corequisite model, using changes in the outcomes of college-ready students during the same time period to control for general time trends or policy changes that may have affected all students. They apply controls for various student demographics, including placement test scores, high school GPA, race, and age at college entry. They also look at students’ achievement levels coming into college to see which groups of students were more affected by the policy change. Their sample includes almost 200,000 individuals who were first-time college students in the Tennessee Board of Regents system, which includes over thirteen community colleges and twenty-four applied technical colleges. On average, 75 percent of students were assigned to remediation for at least one subject.
The findings are a mixed bag. On the positive side, students placed into corequisite remediation were 20.4 percentage points more likely to complete their gateway math course by the end of year one, compared with similar students placed into prerequisite remedial courses (which makes sense given the additional credit hours it takes to complete the latter). This represents a 76 percent improvement from the baseline average of the prerequisite cohorts. Moreover, corequisite remediation had significant positive effects on first-year gateway completion rates for remedial students below the college-ready threshold, though the effects varied by student group. For example, in math the effect was strongest for the highest-scoring remedial students, while in English the pattern was reversed, with the lowest-scoring students experiencing the greatest improvement (which is difficult to square, but may pertain to the lack of a flagship college reading course). Students in the corequisite cohorts were also significantly more likely to enroll in and pass a second college-level course in math or English by the end of year two. These positive effects on college credit accumulation were primarily the result of structural changes in that the corequisite approach removed the delay in access to college-level credits.
The long-term results, however, weren’t good. The analysts found that remedial students, particularly those with lower placement scores, were more likely to drop out and less likely to earn short-term certificates. Specifically, remedial students under the corequisite approach were 4.3 percentage points more likely to drop out of college. Moreover, the average GPA in college-level math (in gateway and more advanced courses) for remedial students went from 1.91 in the prerequisite era to 1.50 for the corequisite cohorts, and the share of those who failed any of these courses increased from 36.9 percent to 50.2 percent.
The takeaway is that replacing the old model of remedial education with a new one carries its own risks and isn’t a silver bullet for addressing the challenge of unprepared college students. As unpopular as this would surely be with postsecondary institutions already facing enrollment declines, one response is not admitting students who are reading and doing math at a middle school level if the institutions have demonstrable proof (such as findings like these!) that they are unable to support those students to higher levels of performance. Prompting unprepared students to drop out, credential-less and with college debt, is not a business that community colleges should be in.
SOURCE: Florence Xiaotao Ran and Hojung Lee, “Does corequisite remediation work for everyone? An exploration of heterogeneous effects and mechanisms,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (March 2024).
