A
New Roadmap
for
Remediation
Community colleges and the organizations that support
them are changing the face of developmental education.
B y M a r k T o ne r
Education may be priceless, but remediation definitely has a price tag.
More specifically, providing developmental education courses to students unprepared for
college-level work costs community colleges and other institutions billions of dollars —
$3.6 billion a year, according to a report from the Alliance for Excellent Education.
With more than a half million students placing into remedial math alone
each year, colleges have a moral imperative to do things differently.
But that’s just the beginning. For students who fail to reach
their educational goals because they struggle in remedial courses,
lost lifetime earnings add up to another $2 billion, according to
the Alliance report. And behind that overwhelming statistic are
hundreds of thousands of individual students whose aspirations
of higher education often come to an abrupt halt when they are
placed in remedial courses.
ACCT President and CEO J. Noah Brown is succinct about the
charge for community colleges and their leaders. “In a perfect
world, we shouldn’t be in the remedial education business,” he
says. “Community college boards need to support aligning K-12
with community college academic standards. Imagine what our
institutions could do with an extra $3.6 billion if all students came
prepared and ready for college-level work.”
Across the country, community colleges and the organizations
that support them are developing new approaches to
developmental education and deepening collaboration with other
partners. Lawmakers in a small but growing number of states,
including Florida, Connecticut, and Colorado, have essentially
curtailed traditional approaches to remediation, focusing instead
on new supports in K-12 and new models at the college level that
accelerate students through remedial courses.
“Over the last six or seven years, we’ve seen a tremendous
improvement in understanding in the world of remediation,”
says Bruce Vandal, vice president of Complete College America.
In part, this is a result of the newfound emphasis on student
success, given that students who fare poorly in remediation often
never earn a single college credit. But it’s also part of a growing
realization that helping students reach those initial credit courses
ties back to community colleges’ longstanding commitment to
access for all.
Changing Perceptions
Although many new approaches to remediation are appearing on
campuses nationwide, they are all predicated on the same idea:
that the traditional approach — which often required unprepared
students to take up to a year and a half of classes before earning
even a single college credit — doesn’t work.
“For a long time, we believed remediation didn’t work because
we weren’t doing a good job instructing these students,” says
CCA’s Vandal. “At the end of the day, what we’ve learned is that
when we place students in long, multi-semester prerequisite
sequences of remedial courses, inevitably they fall out of the
system — not because they’re not capable of doing the work, but
because life gets in the way.”
Data show that students fall out of remediation at every possible
attrition point — even those who successfully complete the first
semester of remediation may fail to enroll in the second semester.
Or they may pass all remedial courses but not enroll in the first
for-credit gatekeeper course they need towards their degree.
In remediation, the clock works against students and the
institutions that serve them. Philip Berry, vice-chair of the City
University of New York (CUNY) board of trustees, knows that
many students take five to six years to complete two years of
community college. “There are a number of reasons that get in
the way,” he says. “What we can do is ensure that people have the
right foundation in reading, writing, and math.”
Jumpstarting Success
The CUNY Start program was created to ensure that students have
an adequate foundation in these subjects before they start classes.
Students who score below adequate levels on CUNY’s placement
exams are given the option of participating in the semester-long
program before enrolling. Those who need to become proficient
in literacy and math take classes on a full-time basis, while those
who need proficiency in one subject have the option of taking
courses part-time over a 15-to-18-week period.
CUNY Start launched in 2009 with 140 students, and has grown
steadily since. This fall, the program will serve 3,800 students
in six community colleges and two four-year institutions within
the CUNY system. A crucial element to its success is cost —
students only pay $75, an amount that doesn’t impact financial
aid for subsequent semesters. “That’s a really important variable,”
Berry says.
Sixty-two percent of recent CUNY Start students achieved
proficiency in reading, compared to 26 percent of new students
who did not participate. In mathematics, 53 percent of students
achieved proficiency, compared to 10 percent of non-participating
students. CUNY Start students also take more credit hours per
semester and have higher GPAs in their first semester of classes
than those who did not participate.
“If you start out strong, you’re going to finish strong,” Berry says.
The Co-Requisite Connection
More than 100 community colleges nationwide are taking a
different tack to remediation, one which CCA calls the co-requisite
model. Knowing that remedial students are at risk of stopping out
at every inflection point before earning credit,
the goal is to “put as many students as you can into gateway
courses right away,” says Vandal. But at the same time that the
students are taking the gatekeeper course, they’re also enrolled in
a co-requisite remedial class or other support program. That way,
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students “know that if they’re going to be dealing with a particular
topic in the gateway course, they’ll be getting additional support in
the co-requisite course,” Vandal says.
Approaches vary from institution to institution. At Austin Peay
State University in Tennessee, students who need remediation in
math spend two additional hours a week in a lab setting where
they receive tutoring and computer practice to supplement
what they are learning in a traditional gateway math course. At
Baltimore City Community College in Maryland, students take
remedial and gateway courses at the same time, with professors
providing intentional connections between what’s being taught
in both classes.
Austin Peay’s co-requisite program has seen students who
were two levels below grade level go from a 10 percent success
rate in gatekeeper courses to 75 percent, according to Vandal. At
Baltimore City Community College, a similar approach in English
has increased success rates from 25 to at least 65 percent, he
adds. The fact that co-requisites work for students who arrive on
campus far below proficiency is critical, Vandal says. “It’s not just
for the students who are right below the cut score,” he says. “What
we’ve seen is that the greatest benefit is for students assessed at
the lowest levels.”
Six states have committed to implementing co-requisite models.
In Colorado, changes in state law now allow four-year students
to take co-requisite courses at their home institutions instead
of enrolling in remedial courses at community colleges, which
have also begun adopting co-requisite models for their own
student populations.
“This is not something that works at the margins,” Vandal says.
“It’s a game-changer strategy in terms of completion.”
Competency-Based Learning
At the same time, there’s growing recognition that remedial
students don’t need a full serving of advanced mathematics to be
successful in many postsecondary programs. “Too often, remedial
sequences are divorced from the reality of what students need to
be successful in higher education,” CCA’s Vandal says.
That used to be the case in Virginia. Glenn DuBois doesn’t
mince words when he describes the remedial math program that
was once in place in the state’s 23 community colleges.
“It was our big disaster field,” says DuBois, chancellor of the
Virginia Community College System (VCCS). But until VCCS
invited an outside group to evaluate its remedial education
programs five years ago, its leaders thought their institutions
were doing a fairly good job preparing students for collegelevel work.
The hard data proved otherwise — and was hard to dispute.
Three out of every four students who entered remedial math
didn’t meet their postsecondary goals. “We were not effective by
any means,” DuBois says. “It was sobering.”
It was also motivating. VCCS leaders used the sobering results
as a reality check. Instead of pointing fingers, the system brought
together 50 math faculty members to redesign the developmental
math program. A year later, the system took a similar, faculty-led
approach to redesigning its remedial courses focused on reading
and writing. So far, both programs are doing a better job at
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getting students through remediation; the jury, DuBois says, is still
out on how those students are faring in gatekeeper courses.
The system has unbundled remedial math, breaking it down to
nine competencies. Entering students who take a new diagnostic
placement test are assessed based on their career objectives —
a student seeking a degree in health or engineering must be
proficient in all nine math competencies to avoid remediation,
while those pursuing less technical careers may only need
selected skills.
Students needing specific competencies for their career path are
enrolled in either classroom or lab-based courses that focus only
on those skills. “The goal here is to focus on the deficiencies and
get people through not in years, but in months,” DuBois says.
Providing Pathways
Developmental math has marked the beginning and the end of
many a college career. Upwards of 80 percent of students who
place into remedial math programs “never earn that one college
credit they need in math to go on,” says Karon Klipple, director of
community college pathways for the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching. “They never make it out.”
For students who struggled with math in high school, community
colleges employing a pathway-based approach to remediation can
introduce something new — relevance. “We’re not teaching math
the way they encountered it before,” says Klipple. “As opposed to
learning procedures for procedures’ sake, they’re thrown into a
whole new way of thinking about using mathematics, encountering
authentic contexts and a real reason to use math.”
Carnegie has developed two math-centric pathways: Statway,
which combines developmental math and college-level statistics in
a yearlong credit-earning course, and Quantway, which combines
a semester of accelerated developmental math and a semester of
college-level math. Both focus on practical skills that students can
use right away, as well as in their future areas of study. Now in
place in 50 institutions across the country, more than 4,400 students
have participated in Carnegie’s pathways in their three years
of existence.
Along with the real-world contexts, Quantway and Statway
have been successful, Klipple says, because they are considered
ongoing pathways, not two discrete courses. Both focus
heavily on student cohorts, which support each other as they
progress through each program, and both stress an instructional
philosophy that includes support for socio-emotional factors.
Professors have been trained to address “math anxiety” and
help build student confidence in their ability to do mathematics.
“There’s tremendous power behind the cohort benefit, which
begins with students beginning together and going through the
experience together,” Klipple says. “A lot of the actions wouldn’t
happen without that strong cohort design.”
When asked about success rates, Carnegie officials have a quick
response: “Triple the success in half the time.” More specifically,
half of the students in Statway have earned college credit within
one year. By comparison, only 15 percent of similar students who
took traditional remediation courses earned college credit within
two years. In Quantway, the success levels are nearly triple that of
traditional courses.
With more than a half million students placing into remedial
math alone each year, colleges have “a moral imperative to do
things differently,” says Klipple. “We know the pathways are a way
to do that.”
K-12 Connections
New standards at the K-12 level that speak to college and career
readiness also provide an opportunity for community colleges to
work more closely with local schools to improve student skills
before they graduate from high school.
That approach is already a reality in Florida, where state law
requires all high school juniors to undergo testing and take
remedial coursework during their senior year of high school.
As a result, this year the state has made college placement exams
and remedial courses optional for all students graduating with
a standard diploma; colleges can recommend but no longer
require that any diploma-holding student take remedial courses.
(Adult students will still be required to take placement exams
and remedial courses as needed.) As is the case elsewhere,
Florida institutions are implementing broad changes to remedial
courses, including shorter refresher courses, online courses, and
co-requisite programs, according to Inside Higher Ed. The same
is true in Connecticut, where new legislation essentially bans
non-credit remedial courses beginning this fall.
In Colorado, state officials credit changes in K-12 standards that
are better aligned with college expectations as one factor that’s
improved remediation rates. (The Common Core, currently being
implemented in more than 40 states and territories, stresses college
and career readiness for all students.) The state has also participated
in the federally funded GEAR UP program, which provides
advising, dual enrollment, and college preparation courses in nearly
20 low-income K-12 schools across the state. Across the nation, dual
enrollment programs are now in place at growing numbers of twoand four-year colleges, allowing students to take more courses for
college credit while still in high school, providing exposure to and
experience with college-level work before graduating.
Other institutions are looking more closely at what students do
in high school, not test scores. Responding to research stating that
up to a third of students who placed into remediation based on
standardized test scores could have passed credit-bearing courses,
Long Beach City College in California worked with a local K-12
district to use high school grades instead of placement tests to
determine which incoming students needed remedial education.
According to Inside Higher Ed, 60 percent of students in the
“Promise Pathways” program placed into college-level English
courses, compared to 11 percent of all incoming students. Once
in those credit-bearing courses, that larger pool of students had
comparable pass rates to the students who had placed out of
remediation in previous years.
CUNY’s Berry, who has also served on a board overseeing
New York City’s public schools, notes that 75 percent of the
postsecondary system’s students come from the city’s K-12 schools.
He believes that community college leaders must work with K-12
leaders as well as continue to develop interventions of their own.
“We have to do something ahead of time, and we [also] have to take
action and innovate,” he says.
The Board’s Role
Regardless of the approach taken, governing boards play a
critical role in supporting institutions as they make sweeping
changes to their remediation programs. Thought leaders in
transforming developmental education offer the following advice
to trustees:
Be aware. “You’ve got to start with reality, not your own
anecdotal evidence,” says DuBois. Evaluating and basing any
plan on solid data is crucial, and outside help may be needed
to provide a clear picture of an institution’s challenges. VCCS,
for example, tapped Columbia University’s Community College
Research Center to study its developmental programs.
Identify attrition points. Trustees must ask questions
about where students fall out of the remediation process —
and why. Are students failing remedial courses, or are they
instead failing to enroll in all of the courses they need to
complete remediation?
Support the administration. Once given a mandate
to make changes, the administration will need the vote of
confidence of their governing board to maintain credibility —
and funding to ensure that they can put new programs in place.
Investments in new programs can be justified through overall
completion metrics, which increasingly are attached to funding.
Students who get through remediation and reach their program
of studies also provide a more stable student population — and
funding base — for the college, according to Vandal.
Avoid finger-pointing. Administration and faculty should be
part of the solution, not the problem. “If you’re going to blame
anybody,” DuBois advises, “blame...the assumptions that you’ve
built over time.”
Encourage faculty involvement. Faculty, particularly those
who teach developmental courses, need to take an active role in
designing new, more effective programs. That means providing
developmental faculty members — who historically have
been adjuncts or other part-time professors — with time and
professional development to help them bring about change.
Look at the big picture. Redesigned developmental
education programs may not be effective if students continue to
struggle with for-credit gatekeeper courses. Ensuring that these
programs are aligned is critical to ensure that students complete
the transition to college-level work.
Work with K-12 systems. Trustees should continue to press
for closer relationships between their institutions and K-12
systems. “Scale will only come, in my opinion, when we come to
the point where we create a seamless and mutually supporting
educational system,” ACCT’s Brown says.
Assess the impact of new programs. “It’s important to
make sure if it’s working,” CUNY’s Berry says. One particularly
valuable barometer of success, according to CCA’s Vandal, is the
number of students entering their program of studies by the end
of the first year.
Be patient. While the need to transform remediation is
imperative, it will also take time to do correctly — and to
measure the impact of changes on student completion. “It took
us decades to get into this mess,” DuBois says, “We’re not going
to get out of it in a year and a half.”
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