For too long, incoming students not deemed fully prepared to do college-level work have had to enter a remediation track intended to teach foundational concepts that institutions assume students haven’t learned yet. It is a logical premise with a significant flaw: This approach to remediation simply does not work.
Institutions funnel hundreds of thousands of first-year students into math and English remedial courses every year, including 40 percent of students at public 2-year colleges. Historically, most students forced to take these classes don’t finish, with noncompletion rates running twice as high among Black, Hispanic and low-income students. After running out of time, money and patience, very few students who start in remediation make it to graduation.
This broken developmental education model has long been a barrier to student success. Reforming it is one of higher education’s biggest challenges and opportunities.
States, colleges, foundations and advocates have made serious strides in improving college completion rates by investing resources to help students successfully navigate their first year — and helping them avoid higher education’s “bridge to nowhere.”
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A cornerstone of this effort has been what is called “corequisite support,” which is designed to address the shortcomings of traditional remediation. Rather than asking students to repeat high school-level work in prerequisite classes, the corequisite model places them in college-level gateway courses in English and math and provides extra academic support.
It spares students from navigating a long and treacherous path of remedial courses that don’t count for college credit. Instead, corequisite support limits attrition by reducing the number of points along the way where students might stop out.
The success of this model has not gone unnoticed. More than 20 states have adopted corequisite support to supplement or replace traditional approaches to remediation. Indeed, the corequisite model has shown such promise that it should become the default option for students who require additional support.
Corequisite support is delivering results. A growing body of evidence collected from institutions across the country demonstrates that this approach is a significant improvement over traditional prerequisite remediation; it helps students build momentum at the start of their college journey, so they don’t drop out in the critical first year.
Georgia, Nevada and Louisiana have implemented statewide policies to replace prerequisite remediation with corequisite support and have all seen significant increases in the completion of gateway math and English courses — a doubling, tripling and near-quintupling of student success. Additional research suggests that corequisite support, when paired with other student success strategies, has a lasting effect on both course pass rates and graduation rates.
In an analysis of 10 years of data from Tennessee, one of the first states to embrace the corequisite model, researchers concluded that community college students in corequisite support courses demonstrated “significantly improved gateway and subsequent college-level course completion.” However, they also found that the corequisite students didn’t progress faster or graduate in greater numbers than students remediated under the former approach a decade earlier. While this may seem like a negative, the data actually suggests opportunities to build upon the model’s success.
Related: A decade of data in one state shows an unexpected result when colleges drop remedial courses
Historically, most students enrolled in traditional remedial courses never made it past their first semester or first year and never had access to pathways to graduation. Today, significantly higher numbers of students are enrolling in and passing college-level math and English thanks to the corequisite model. With more students making it to and through gateway courses, even if the percentage of students who graduate remains static, more students are succeeding overall. Students who would have never made it past their first year — and were previously invisible — now have access to a pathway to graduation.
Being placed into remediation represents a challenge, but not the only one. Students, especially those who have historically been the least well-served by colleges and universities, still must overcome numerous obstacles on their way to graduation. As successful as developmental education reform has been, institutions must continually reexamine their assumptions, reassess what’s working and invest in student support that can remove further barriers to college success later in a student’s college career.
Higher education must not return to the days when remedial education blocked pathways to opportunity and success. Reforming our country’s approach to remedial education — using it instead as a bridge to success — represents one of our greatest hopes for improving the numbers of first-generation, low-income, Black, Latinx and Indigenous students who access and complete college.
College leaders and policy makers must ensure that we replace traditional prerequisite remediation with corequisite support because it delivers on the promise of student success.
Brandon Protas is the assistant vice president for alliance engagement at Complete College America, a national nonprofit working to increase college completion rates and close institutional performance gaps.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about college remediation was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.
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For too long, incoming students not deemed fully prepared to do college-level work have had to enter a remediation track intended to teach foundational concepts that institutions assume students haven’t learned yet. It is a logical premise with a significant flaw: This approach to remediation simply does not work. Institutions funnel hundreds of thousands of
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