This piece originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Fifteen years ago, a broad coalition of foundations, nonprofits, and educators launched a bold effort to reform the vast system of college remedial education that was destroying the higher-education opportunities of millions of students. Today, this work remains unfinished — the victim of inertia, lack of resources, and competing priorities. Yet it is more important than ever to reinvigorate reform, and there are clear steps campuses can take to break the logjam.
Declining test scores indicate a worsening crisis in college “readiness” post-pandemic. Average ACT scores have dropped in each of the past five years, hitting a low of 19.5 in 2023; just 21 percent of students met all four of the exam’s benchmarks for college readiness in English, math, reading and science. Recent analyses also find that third through eighth graders haven’t caught up from Covid-related educational disruptions.
Many of these students, if they go on to college, will likely be required to take noncredit “remedial” courses before they begin their regular college work. Many will end up in traditional, multi-semester remedial sequences that are stigmatizing, dull and usually a dead end. According to a landmark analysis by the nonprofit Complete College America, nearly four in 10 community-college students assigned to remediation never finish these courses, short-circuiting their college careers. Fewer than one in 10 graduate within three years. The numbers are bleaker still for low-income and minority students, who are more likely to be put in remediation.
Thanks to reformers’ efforts over the last decade, there’s a robust playbook for addressing the problem. This includes using multiple measures for student assessment, such as high-school GPA, to avoid unnecessary remedial placements. Used alone, standardized placement tests may incorrectly sort as many as one in four students in math and one in three students in English.
Another promising practice is to end the insistence on algebra for students in non-STEM majors, focusing instead on quantitative reasoning or statistical analysis more relevant to their studies. This approach, called “mathematics pathways,” has led to higher persistence and pass rates among students who are enrolled in developmental-education courses. When the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released its curricula for statistics and quantitative reasoning in the early 2010s, it tallied success rates of 61 percent and 75 percent, respectively, over ten years and reached more than 81,000 students.
Schools and educational systems on the leading edge of reform have also abandoned traditional remediation altogether in favor of “corequisites,” often with spectacular success. Under this approach, students enroll in college-level classes, along with a companion class — the corequisite — that provides needed support. In states like Tennessee and Louisiana, where corequisites are now universal, completion gaps between developmental and “college-ready” students have narrowed dramatically.
In Louisiana, first-year students participating in corequisite math in 2023-24 passed a credit-bearing class at the rate of 52 percent, compared to just 11 percent for those enrolled in traditional remedial math in 2020-21. A 2022 study found that after corequisites were introduced in Tennessee, pass rates for college-level English rose by 17 percentage points among Black students and 14 points for Hispanic students (although disparities remain compared to white students).
Yet only about 25 percent of colleges and universities have reformed their remedial offerings at scale, and even among many of these institutions, traditional remediation still persists. More than a dozen states have no identifiable state- or system-wide policies on developmental education, including Alaska Hawaii, Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Utah, plus the District of Columbia, according to a 2021 analysis by the Education Commission of the States. Only a handful of states have fully embraced dev-ed reform: Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, and California.
States should provide colleges and universities with the two things they need to implement reform: money and data. Even on a smaller scale, incentive grants could overcome the inertia that often impedes reform; defray transition costs; and, most importantly, pay for faculty engagement, training and professional development so that reforms are self-sustaining. In many instances, commitments to faculty and system autonomy can be obstacles to reform unless instructors and administrators buy in.
States should also aggressively collect data on the number of students in remediation each year and on students’ trajectory through higher education. This information could illuminate the need for reform, reveal inequities in access to college-level work, offer benchmarks for the effectiveness of reforms, and identify additional barriers to student success.
Developmental-education experts Amy Getz and Bruce Vandal estimate that, if every state were to replicate Tennessee’s results with developmental-education reform, more than 226,000 additional students would finish gateway math and English every year, including more than 100,000 who are Black or Hispanic. Finishing the job of reform would save students time and money, remove a serious barrier to social mobility, and help the nation build the globally competitive workforce it needs. Why wait?