Historically, students who enroll in community colleges unprepared for college-level work have been required to take prerequisite courses to boost their math and English skills before they’re permitted to enroll in credit bearing courses. This unexpected burden of additional time and money often leads large numbers of students to drop out prior to earning a degree.
To combat widespread attrition, many state education authorities began developing co-requisite remediation models, where underprepared students are simultaneously enrolled in credit-bearing courses alongside the non-credit courses designed to boost their reading and math skills. Research from Tennessee and elsewhere showed some success in speeding students up, lowering costs, and increasing persistence in the short term, but dropout numbers ended up as bad or worse in the longer term. A new working paper from CALDER looks at Kentucky’s recent efforts to help remedial students and finds a small ray of hope among their short term outcomes, with long term impacts still unclear.
The Bluegrass State’s 16 community colleges (collectively known as the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, or KCTCS) long followed the traditional prerequisite remediation process described above for all enrollees who did not meet statewide college readiness standards—typically based on a single ACT cutoff score on math and/or English tests. This could mean up to three semesters of coursework at full price without earning a single credit toward an associate degree. Of the students assigned to this type of remediation, less than 17 percent went on to meet readiness for credit-bearing coursework in their first year. The rest either switched to less-intensive certificate programs, dragged their non-credit bearing remediation into a second year, or dropped out before completing a full year. As in many other states, the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education began developing a co-requisite model to try and reverse these problematic trends.
The new KCTCS plan, rolled out systemwide in fall 2019, was three-tiered. Officials set two ACT test cutoff scores in both math and English. Above the highest cutoff, students were considered college-ready and required no remedial courses (although they could take them if they wanted). Below the lowest cutoff, students were generally required to take the traditional non-credit, prerequisite remedial courses. Students in the middle tier had access to a new co-requisite path.
Rather than comprising a preparatory curriculum to be completed before starting college-level coursework, co-requisite remedial courses were paired directly with the college-level classes they supported—often taught by the same instructor and/or teaching assistants—and provided what the CALDER authors describe as “on-demand support.” Students also earned credit toward their degree for completing them (1 or 2 credits per remedial course, depending on frequency, as compared to 3 credits for the typical college-level course). This could be interpreted as a lowering of standards for graduation—requiring fewer college-level credits among those earned toward a diploma—but the researchers do not delve into this. They do, however, discuss a new math course sequence (called Quantitative Reasoning, or QR) introduced alongside the remediation model, which is definitely characterized as a “less-intensive” pathway for students. It allowed for fewer math courses/credit hours toward degrees whose program area was deemed not to require college algebra. Students scoring in both the middle and lower tiers in math could opt into the QR path—with or without co-requisite remedial classes—if their degree area allowed for it.
The CALDER researchers use student-level administrative records obtained from the Kentucky Center for Statistics covering more than 43,600 newly-enrolled freshmen pursuing an associate degree (as opposed to certificate-program enrollees) at any KCTCS school between 2019–20 and 2023–24. Only 17 percent of students in the study sample met the highest (college-ready) cutoff in math and 49 percent in English. Approximately 69 percent and 21 percent of students had ACT scores below the lowest cutoff in math and English, respectively. CALDER’s researchers compared students just above and just below the two cutoff scores for their analyses.
The report details the differences in prerequisite and co-requisite enrollment around each cutoff point, but those numbers are difficult to make sense of due to students choosing non-required pathways (middle-tier folks enrolling in a co-requisite course when they don’t have to, a significant number of lower-tier students somehow avoiding prerequisite remediation, etc.). The most interesting finding in this regard, however, is that the shorter and less-rigorous QR math pathway proved popular with middle-tier students. Students just below the highest ACT math cutoff score were 5 percentage points more likely to start with a QR math course—as opposed to a college algebra course—than their higher-scoring peers. At the lower ACT cutoff, low-tier students were 4 percentage points more likely to start with the QR pathway (including co-requisite remediation) than their middle-tier peers just above the cutoff.
The analysts then estimate causal effects of remediation using a regression discontinuity design around the ACT score cutoffs in both subjects. In English, some benefits of co-requisite remediation were clear. Middle-tier students who took co-requisite remedial classes were about 5 percentage points more likely to pass college English within their first year than similar students who began credit-bearing courses without remedial support. These benefits accrued most strongly to male students and those attending college part-time. However, co-requisite remediation requirements reduced first-year college English enrollment overall by 6 percentage points. The co-requisite benefits in math were even smaller than those in English, but were still statistically-significant, especially for female students who opted for the QR math pathway. There are no longer-term impacts on persistence and completion yet available for the KCTCS model.
The report concludes with an expectedly downbeat assessment of the findings: Co-requisite remediation in Kentucky appears to be less harmful than the prerequisite system it largely replaced; however, that previous system was almost universally detrimental to student success. A small improvement on the very worst efforts to keep underprepared college freshman from dropping out of community college is not much to cheer about. The report’s authors talk briefly about ways higher education institutions could modify their remedial education to better support students (research finds positive impacts of advising, coaching, and even non-educational financial support), but ignore the obvious answers—ending the “college for all” mentality and making sure that those kids who are moving on to college are fully prepared before they leave high school.
SOURCE: Zeyu Xu and Benjamin Backes, “First, Do No Harm. But Can We Do Better? An Evaluation of a Statewide Developmental Education Reform,” CALDER Working Paper (March 2026).
