Escape from Higher Ed’s Bermuda Triangle
When Jabrielle Jones enrolled at rural Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Oregon, in 2019, a placement test deemed her unready for college-level math. Jones, who has a learning disability, said she never really learned math at the small-town school in Florida where she grew up. Her special education teacher was so disengaged, Jones said, that class time was mostly study hall. “We were encouraged to sort of self-teach through workbooks,” she told me.
Clatsop put her into MTH 70—Beginning Algebra—a “remedial” class two tiers below college-level math that would not earn her college credit. Though perhaps unsurprised, Jones was still disappointed. “I was like, ‘I’m going to be in math for years just to get to a 100-level class,’ ” she said. She considered dropping out.
Like Jones, many students entering college this fall won’t be taking college-level courses. Rather, they’ll be enrolled in a gauntlet of “developmental” math or English courses if they’re not considered “college ready”—typically not because of their ambition or talent but because of subpar preparation in high school. Disproportionately, these students will be minorities or from low-income families. Few will finish, and even fewer will graduate. In a landmark 2012 report, the nonprofit Complete College America found that “nearly 4 in 10 remedial students in community colleges never complete their remedial courses” and that “fewer than one in 10 graduate within three years.” Many will be mired in debt for courses that didn’t even earn them college credit.
Jones, though, got a chance to skip the rest of her remedial courses when a Clatsop professor, Celeste Petersen, invited her to try an alternative to traditional remediation: a college-level math class paired with a one-credit “corequisite” companion course for students needing extra support. Petersen had begun piloting corequisites at Clatsop in 2020, following the lead of other reformers across the country who were rethinking remedial education. Jones ended up earning an A while gaining confidence in a subject she had dreaded. “I am not in love with math, and I will never be in love with math,” Jones said. “But math and I have a copacetic relationship now. I don’t fear it anymore.”
Jones’s success is no fluke. Last year, Petersen’s developmental math students passed first-year college math at a rate of 87 percent—outperforming her “college ready” students in the same classes by two percentage points. “Students are passing courses they wouldn’t even have been allowed to take before,” Petersen told me. Her students, moreover, are primarily from low-income families and diverse in age and experience. “Last term, my youngest student was 16, and my oldest student was 78,” said Petersen.
Petersen’s corequisite courses are part of a broader wave of innovation that has swept through the development education world in recent years, and rigorous evaluations also now demonstrate the effectiveness of these new approaches. When the University of Georgia system replaced traditional remedial classes with corequisites, for instance, it more than tripled the pass rates for students in introductory, “gateway” college math. Texas, Tennessee, and Louisiana have likewise seen dramatic results.
Yet far too many students are still trapped in the morass of traditional remedial education. Fifteen years after a broad coalition of foundations, nonprofits, and educators launched a bold effort at reform, just 25 percent of colleges and universities have reformed their remedial offerings “at scale,” according to a 2020 report by the educational consultancy Tyton Partners. The many obstacles to change include an insistence on faculty autonomy, dependence on the jobs and revenue that traditional remediation generates, and perceptions of students’ needs—along with plain old inertia.
Even at Clatsop, reform has been only partial. Until very recently, Petersen was the only one of three math instructors at the small, rural school to teach corequisite classes. Clatsop, in turn, is among only 10 of the 17 Oregon community colleges that have adopted this model—an unevenness that is emblematic of the progress of reform nationwide. Oregon’s Portland Community College, for instance, offers six different “developmental” math courses below college level, including four levels of basic and intermediate algebra, along with “math literacy.” None of these classes counts toward a degree.
Yet the need for reform today could not be greater. In the wake of the pandemic, record numbers of high school students potentially lack critical foundational skills, deepening an already dire crisis in college readiness. Average ACT scores reached a 30-year low in 2023 after falling for six straight years. And at the other end of the college pipeline, completion rates are equally disappointing: Fewer than half of first-time community college students who enrolled in 2017 earned a degree by 2023.
Unfortunately, traditional remedial education is more likely to worsen these challenges than to solve them, impeding students’ academic progress and undermining the nation’s goal of producing a globally competitive workforce. Though certainly no silver bullet, remedial education reform is a necessary first step toward better college success and completion. Federal intervention—in the form of grants to incentivize change and robust data collection to measure progress—can revitalize momentum for reform and build on existing innovations. It’s time to finish the job.
American remedial education is about as old as American higher education itself, and its original intent was a noble one: to broaden college access by helping under-prepared students meet the rigors of college-level work. The irony is that now it’s hurting the students it’s intended to help.
In 1849, the University of Wisconsin established the nation’s first college-preparatory department, and by 1889, more than 80 percent of U.S. colleges and universities had followed suit. Junior colleges—what are now community colleges—took over the task beginning in the early 20th century, and in later decades, so-called developmental education was perceived as an important mechanism for promoting equity, especially for low-income and minority students handicapped by inadequate K–12 education. Remedial education became universally available and a common starting point for many students. Between 2003 and 2009 (the most recent government figures available), some 68 percent of community college students and 40 percent of four-year college students—including 58 percent of students at open-access four-year institutions like regional public universities—took at least one developmental class.
Perhaps because of its high-minded goals, no one seriously challenged the efficacy of remedial education until about two decades ago. Among the first to sound the alarm was Peter Adams, who taught developmental writing at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) for 36 years. Beginning in the late 1980s, he began tracking the progress of his students. While the pass rates for his developmental writing classes were high, he discovered that very few of his students were going on to enroll in college-level English 101 and 102. The pass rate for English 101 among his students was just 33 percent, and among his lower-level remedial students, only about 12 percent.
The phenomenon Adams discovered and that researchers like Thomas Bailey of the Community College Research Center (CCRC) have also documented is what reformers today call “chained attrition” or “exponential attrition”—the fact that multiple semesters of remediation create multiple exit points, compounding dropout rates over time. Or as Adams put it, the longer the pipeline, the more likely it is to spring leaks, especially if students are coping with multiple life challenges, including work and family. It’s perhaps the most significant problem with traditional remediation and why a seminal 2009 article by Camille Esch for the Washington Monthly called remedial courses higher education’s “Bermuda triangle.” Among low-income and minority students, dropout rates in remedial education are especially bleak. According to Complete College America, nearly 86 percent of Black students, 76 percent of Latino students, and 80 percent of low-income students never make it through remediation.
Traditional remediation’s content can be as faulty as its structure. The CCRC researcher W. Norton Grubb, for instance, disparaged the typical approach in many schools as “skills and drills,” which “violate all the maxims for good teaching in adult education.” In a 2011 study of remedial education at 13 California community colleges, Grubb and his team concluded that the classes were typically “painful and tedious.” “Many of these classes we observed were relentless in their emphasis on drill and practice on small skills, without any applications to the world outside the classroom,” the researchers wrote.
Both instructors and students see remedial education as stigmatizing and demoralizing. One such critic is Sbeydeh Viveros-Walton, who is now director of higher education for Public Advocates, a California nonprofit on the front lines of developmental education reform in the state. As a student, one of her first college experiences was remedial “basic math”—starting with addition and subtraction. “What that does to a student and their academic confidence is terrible,” she said. “It really deters them and sets them up for failure.” When the English professor Dana LeMay began teaching developmental classes at Century College, a two-year institution outside of Minneapolis, she was “horrified” by the curriculum she was given to follow. “It was insulting,” she said. “These students know how to write sentences. It was absurd, and I just felt very complicit.”
Worse still, many students likely don’t need remediation to begin with. According to a series of influential studies published by the researcher Judith Scott-Clayton, the standardized placement tests used by many colleges may incorrectly assign as many as one in four students in math and one in three students in English. Until recently, most schools relied on one of two standardized tests to determine placements. One of these was ACT’s COMPASS, which the company phased out in 2016 after mounting criticism of its inaccuracy in predicting students’ success. The other test, the College Board’s ACCUPLACER, is still used by many institutions. The University of the District of Columbia, for instance, requires all incoming students to take the exam, which the Washington Monthly once described as “a short, inexpensive, one-shot multiple-choice test of questionable accuracy and worth.”
Reformers do, however, have a good sense of what could work to fix remedial education. After discovering the discouraging data about his students, the CCBC’s Peter Adams launched what would become the nation’s first corequisite program in 2007 and a model for reform nationwide. Under the program, developmental students skipped remediation and enrolled directly into English 101, along with a one-hour companion class that met immediately after each 101 session to provide needed support. This approach both eliminated the multicourse remedial pipeline and solved the problem of stigma, since developmental and college-ready students took the same class.
“The goal was not to make up their deficits from high school,” Adams told me. “What we were trying to do [in this program] was to help figure out what we could do to help them succeed in English 101. It was an entirely different way of thinking about the course.” Instructors helped prepare students for the next meeting of the class by reviewing the last session, working on upcoming assignments, or editing drafts for revision, among other activities. Faculty set aside time to help students with any nonacademic challenges they faced, such as coping with stress or managing finances.
The results were almost immediate. In a 2012 evaluation, the CCRC found the pass rate for English 101 and 102 to be 75 percent and 38 percent respectively for corequisite students, compared to 39 percent and 17 percent for developmental students not in the new program.
A corequisite was also key to the success of the Clatsop student Jabrielle Jones.
“We were empowered to ask questions and not feel stupid,” she said. Jones’s professor, Celeste Petersen, has taught at Clatsop for eight years but began her career in K–12 education. She said she tries to promote “active learning” in her corequisite classroom, with lots of hands-on activities, minimal lectures, and as much student participation as possible. For instance, Petersen used real-life examples to illustrate problems, which led to breakthroughs in Jones’s learning. “One of my hobbies is baking—and well, that’s science and math,” Jones said. “This whole time, I’ve been doing science and math successfully as a hobby, but I just wasn’t cognitively aware. Once she started to put those things in place, it was like the synapses were finally firing on all engines.”
Other colleges copying this model have also reported significant success, and in a handful of states, such as Tennessee and Texas, which were among the first to adopt corequisites, the approach is now universal. In Tennessee, for instance, a 2022 study found that for students with the lowest reading placement scores, corequisites narrowed the completion gap for college-level as compared to “college ready” students from 35 percentage points to 19. Pass rates also rose by 17 percentage points for Black students and 14 points for Hispanic students (although disparities remain in comparison to whites).
In the meantime, a spate of philanthropic and federal investment was also helping to build a strong road map for reform, along with an evidence base for promising practices. In 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $110 million to support the nation’s first major developmental education reform initiative, launched by the nonprofit Achieving the Dream. Other big-name philanthropies, like the Lumina Foundation and Ascendium, followed suit, while the U.S. Department of Education established a research center dedicated to developmental education. In 2010, President Barack Obama’s White House Summit on Community Colleges focused on developmental education reform as a strategy for improving college completion. These infusions of philanthropic and federal support enabled research to validate the case for reform, allowed colleges to try out potential fixes, and paid for rigorous evaluations to see if interventions worked. Achieving the Dream, for instance, provided each of 15 community colleges with grants of $743,000 over three years to experiment with developmental education reform. Grants also helped pay for faculty professional development, technical assistance, and transition costs.
While corequisites may have been the most dramatic reform to emerge from these efforts, other important innovations also emerged. Among these is the use of “multiple measures” in addition to testing, such as high school GPA, to reduce the risk of mis-assignment to remediation. At California’s Long Beach City College, which pioneered this approach, the share of first-time students assigned to college-level math jumped from 9 percent to 30 percent once the school considered high school performance, not just test scores. Meanwhile, pass rates for college-level courses remained relatively unchanged, “suggesting that students who were moved into the courses were as capable of passing them as their peers,” a later study noted.
Another promising reform has been to end the traditional insistence on college algebra for all students, including those not majoring in STEM. Instead, students are routed toward curricula relevant to their course of study, such as quantitative reasoning or statistics—an approach called “pathways.” At Paris Junior College in rural north Texas, for instance, students choose one of three college-level math sequences: quantitative reasoning for liberal arts, fine arts, and humanities majors; statistics for those in social sciences, nursing, and health professions; and algebra to calculus for students studying science, engineering, business, and accounting, or aspiring to teach math.
“We’re not trying to give students an easier path or an easier option,” Ed McCraw, dean of math and sciences at Paris Junior College, told me. “We’re trying to give them relevant math courses that they can actually use in their degree plan and then throughout their lives in their jobs.”
Given that fewer than a fifth of college algebra students are in majors that require calculus (the only practical reason to learn algebra), pathways “are a better way to get students to see themselves as mathematical learners and thinkers,” said Amy Getz, a senior program associate at the nonprofit WestEd who helped pioneer math pathways curricula. When the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released its “Statway” and “Quantway” curricula for statistics and quantitative reasoning in the early 2010s, it tallied success rates of 61 percent (Statway) and 75 percent (Quantway) over 10 years.
As a result of these efforts, reformers chalked up major legislative and policy wins in many states, as part of efforts to scale up promising reforms. Peter Adams, for instance, said he crisscrossed the country beginning in the early years of reform, ultimately visiting schools in at least 43 states to consult with them on corequisite implementation. “I stopped counting after 250 schools adopted it,” he said. National and statewide conferences on developmental education reform were frequent and well attended.
Thirty-three states now have state- or system-wide policies that address at least some aspect of developmental education, such as placement or curriculum, according to a 2022 analysis by the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (CAPR). Florida, for instance, ended mandatory remediation in 2014, and in 2017, California passed landmark legislation that required community colleges to use multiple measures for placement and to “maximize the probability” that students finish college-level math and English classes within their first year—in effect establishing a legal right for students to enroll directly into college-level courses and bypass remediation.
Not enough students, however, are experiencing the benefits of reform. More than a dozen states have no identifiable state- or system-wide policies on developmental education, including Alaska, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Utah, among others, according to a 2021 50-state comparison by the Education Commission of the States. The 2020 Tyton Partners study found that even among schools reporting themselves “at scale” with reforms, 24 percent said traditional, multi-semester remedial sequences still composed more than half of the developmental courses offered. In a 2023 webinar sponsored by the nonprofit Strong Start to Finish, WestEd’s Amy Getz and the college completion expert Bruce Vandal identified just five states that were truly at scale or close to it, which they defined as all students having the opportunity to enroll directly in gateway math and English courses aligned to their chosen course of study in their first year, with access to appropriate supports (such as corequisites). These states are Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, and California.
Reformers like Adams say their phones haven’t rung as often, especially since the pandemic. “The steam in pushing these reforms has been lost,” said one longtime advocate who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A commitment to institutional or faculty autonomy is one reason reforms have been uneven. Oregon’s community colleges, for instance, are each independently governed. “We are not a ‘system’ in any way, shape, or form,” Elizabeth Cox Brand, executive director of the Oregon Community College Association’s Student Success Center, told me. While Brand has secured grants and technical support to encourage developmental education reform, she can’t force schools to come on board. “We’ve hit this point where we’ve exhausted the coalition of the willing,” she said.
Many faculty are also reluctant to abandon a model of teaching they may have pursued their entire career. When confronted by reform, “it’s like their sense of professional identity gets challenged,” said Katie Hern, an English professor at Skyline College in San Bruno, California, who has been one of California’s leading reform advocates. Other instructors worry about the welfare of students, especially for those in accelerated corequisite classes. “There’s still a lot of resistance from people saying, ‘How can someone pass a college math class who hasn’t already taken all of this other math?’ Clatsop professor Celeste Petersen said.
Faculty and other stakeholders also felt left out of the process when legislative victories in the early years of reform brought rapid, widespread change. “Faculty want control over their classrooms,” Bruce Vandal acknowledged. “It’s a bit unusual to have a state legislator decide you can’t teach [remedial] courses anymore after having it be a fundamental part of what community colleges have been doing forever.” Connecticut, for instance, ended up overhauling its reform efforts after faculty and administrators objected to legislation they said was too prescriptive and burdensome. In other instances, obstacles to reform have been practical. “It’s an open secret that developmental education pays for other parts of the institution,” said a foundation official who spoke on condition of anonymity. While reformers argue faculty can be reassigned and revenue recouped through increased enrollment in college-level classes, the sheer volume of remedial classes can still generate significant revenue, especially if taught by inexpensive adjunct faculty. Collectively, students and their families spend about $1.3 billion a year on remedial education, according to a 2018 study by CAPR.
Reforms like corequisite education can also pose logistical hurdles for some schools. In North Carolina, for instance, where some of the state’s 63 community colleges serve as few as 400 students, scheduling corequisite classes was “very difficult” because of timing and staffing constraints. “We saw a decrease in students attempting gateway courses,” said James Kelley, associate vice president of student services for the North Carolina Community College System Office.
The biggest barrier to reform is the lack of quick fixes, such as simply swapping out textbooks. Scaling reform requires change that is both “structural and cultural,” Victoria Ballerini, associate director of Strong Start to Finish, told me. “It’s a lot.”
Nevertheless, revitalizing remedial education reform would bring immense benefits to U.S. students. In their 2023 webinar, Getz and Vandal argued that if every state were to replicate Tennessee’s results with developmental education reform, 226,618 additional students would finish gateway math and English every year, including more than 100,000 who are Latino or Black. Students would save time and money while earning college credits, sidestepping a major obstacle to college completion and putting themselves on a path to a more secure future.
While philanthropy led the way 15 years ago, kickstarting reform and showing what’s achievable, it’s now the federal government’s turn to step up with renewed investment. In particular, Congress could help by providing reformers the two things they most need: money and data. First, it could award competitive grants, available directly to colleges or college systems, to defray the costs of implementing reform, including technical assistance, transition expenses, and the all-important task of engaging faculty and providing professional development opportunities. Grants could also pay for schools to experiment with new models of developmental support. While corequisites remain the current gold standard for curriculum reform, many students still aren’t succeeding and may need a different form of help. Most importantly, the allure of extra funds could help to overcome reform’s biggest enemy: inertia.
These grants, moreover, would not need to be enormous to make a difference. In West Virginia, for instance, which adopted statewide corequisite education in 2013, reformers credit some relatively modest philanthropic grants as instrumental to their success. Corley Dennison, vice chancellor for academic affairs at the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission, told me the funds helped pay for a variety of faculty outreach and training opportunities that helped promote reform. “We gave stipends for course development and stipends for travel—things like that to show that we were willing to put up money and willing to support them,” he told me. Ultimately, he said, “I found champions among the faculty who were very excited about this and realized how well co-req was working.” As a result, he continued, “we were able to convince a large number of the schools to go with corequisites before we even wrote the policy.”
Second, the federal government should make substantial investments in data collection around remedial education and the impacts of reform. Comprehensive current national data on the number of students assigned to remedial education each year and their outcomes does not exist. While some states now closely track student participation in developmental education, the federal government’s most recent analysis of remedial course taking was in 2016, based on data drawn from the 2003–2009 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study. Though the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study provides some data, including on racial and economic disparities in remediation, the survey occurs only every three to four years and prioritizes information about student financial aid.
Better national data would help define the scope of the problem left to solve, particularly in states slower to embrace reform. Knowing how many students are in remediation each year and their trajectory through college could arm reformers with the evidence needed to build their case; knowing who is in these classes could help illuminate inequities in access to college-level work. Reliable data standardized across states would also clarify the effectiveness of reforms, which would in turn inform policy choices and course design. Finally, better data could help states and systems measure their progress and identify additional barriers to student success.
The ultimate impact would be the transformation of individual lives. After passing college math with the help of her corequisite class, Jabrielle Jones earned her associate’s degree from Clatsop and is now enrolled at Portland State University, at the age of 40, to earn a long-delayed bachelor’s degree in urban development. She credits Celeste Petersen for opening the door to these opportunities. “I’m finally not poverty stricken anymore because I have an education,” Jones said. Her only regret is the delay she experienced in pursuing her degree. “If co-req had existed when I started,” she told me, “I would have finished my associate’s three years earlier.”
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