Writing in Washington Monthly, Anne Kim, a senior fellow at FutureEd—a think tank based at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy—recently highlighted the limitations of remedial education in college and the slow uptake of more effective alternatives.
Before taking college-level classes, some incoming first-year students who didn’t get sufficient college preparation in high school may be placed in non-credit developmental (also known remedial) math or English courses. Remedial education is meant to cover material that would set underprepared students up for college success, but “the irony is that now it’s hurting the students it’s intended to help,” says Kim, author of the FutureEd report Incomplete: The Unfinished Revolution in College Remedial Education.
A ‘Bermuda triangle’
Students who take multiple semesters of remedial courses are likely to find themselves in a sort of “Bermuda triangle,” Camille Esch, director of the California Education Program at the New America Foundation, said in a 2009 article for Washington Monthly. Almost four in 10 community college students in remedial classes never complete them, and fewer than 1 in 10 go on to graduate in three years, according to a landmark 2012 report from Complete College America.
Black, Latine, and low-income students, overrepresented in remedial classes, are disproportionately affected by this phenomenon. Many leave college with debt for courses that did not count toward their degree and without a credential.
Students are also often placed in remedial classes they don’t need. Some U.S. colleges and universities assign students to developmental courses based on their standardized placement test results. However, research shows that those tests may inaccurately assess students’ readiness for college courses.
An alternative approach
The push for a more effective model gained momentum in the early 2000s, fueled by investments from state governments, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and philanthropies. In 2007, Peter Adams, who taught at the Community College of Baltimore County, launched a new model that allowed students to skip remediation and instead enroll in English 101 with other college-ready students, provided that they took a one-hour, single-credit “corequisite” companion class that offered additional support. In the corequisite course, faculty reviewed previous assignments, upcoming lessons, and rough drafts and also supported students with nonacademic challenges.
“The goal was not to make up their deficits from high school,” Adams tells Kim. “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.”
In its 2012 evaluation of the new model, the Community College Research Center (CCRC) found that the English 101 and 102 pass rates for corequisite students were 75% and 38%, respectively, compared to 39% and 17% for developmental students not in the program.
Renewed push for reform
Reforms, backed by federal officials and large philanthropies, continued through the early 2010s. Some states, such as Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee broadly adopted the corequisite model, with strong outcomes. In Tennessee, a 2022 report found that corequisites reduced the completion rate gap for gateway English between developmental and “college-ready” students from 35 percentage points to 19. The University of Georgia system tripled its pass rate for students in introductory college math after replacing traditional remedial courses with corequisites. Colleges in Texas and Louisiana have seen similarly positive results.
Other reforms have included using high school performance, not just testing, to avoid mis-assignment to remediation. Instead of requiring all students to take college algebra, some institutions also allowed students who were not majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to take classes other than college algebra, such as quantitative reasoning or statistics.
Untapped opportunity
Still, movement away from remedial courses has been relatively slow: just 25% of colleges and universities have reformed their approach “at scale,” according to a 2020 report by the educational consultancy Tyton Partners. Reforms have faced a series of obstacles including insistence on faculty autonomy, logistical hurdles, and a need for the revenue generated by traditional remedial courses. Advocates for reform say there’s an even greater need now due to pandemic-related academic setbacks. For instance, average ACT scores reached a 30-year low in 2023, and less than half of first-time community college students who enrolled in 2017 had earned a degree by 2023.
Federal intervention can kickstart reforms, says Kim. Modest competitive grants can help more colleges establish corequisites and develop other effective alternatives to the traditional remediation model. Increased investment in data collection also will help shed light on student participation in developmental education, access to college-level work, and the effectiveness of reforms.