The weaknesses of remedial education in community colleges have been well documented. Complete College America, a nonprofit group that is dedicated to improving graduation rates nationally, has dubbed remedial education a “bridge to nowhere” because the majority of students who begin remedial education never make it to credit-bearing courses.
Remedial education typically refers to classes in math or English that are intended to prepare students for college-level courses. Standard remedial classes are non-credit-bearing, and some sequences can be three semesters long, meaning that, even if students stay on track, it can take up to a year and half before they begin taking classes for credit. For students attempting to get a degree, remedial education can set back their time to completion further.
A 2012 Complete College America report found that fewer than 1 in 10 students who start in remedial education graduate from community college within three years.
Given the poor returns on remediation, colleges and policy makers have studied different ways to reform it. A new report from New America, “How to Fix Remediation at Scale,” suggests that co-requisite remediation produces substantially better results than other models, analyzing findings from Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
Co-requisite developmental education simultaneously enrolls students in remedial and college-level classes in the same subject, allowing students to earn credit toward a degree while providing them with the support they need.
“The traditional remediation paths are just so long that students get discouraged and fall out of them, whereas if you connect the support services with the college level course, the student finishes the college level and the remedial course at the same time,” said Iris Palmer, senior policy analyst at New America and author of the recent report.
All five states found that the co-requisite model is the most promising, although some experimented with different models. West Virginia and Indiana, for instance, piloted “stretch courses,” which give students more time to complete the course; boot camps to prepare students for placement exams; and a “modular” approach, which breaks down the remedial coursework into more manageable pieces.
