From the City University of New York to the California State University System, authorities have begun reducing the number of remedial courses available to postsecondary students. Some legislatures have made it clear that they do not want to pay colleges to teach what public high schools already receive tax dollars to teach; other legislatures want community colleges to handle all remediation, to eliminate duplication of such programs at four-year institutions.
Claims about the number of students who enroll in remedial courses seem to escalate constantly. We hear that"75 per cent of colleges offer remedial courses,""80 per cent of the students at my college need remediation,” or"85 per cent of minority students will be shut out if we don’t have remedial courses.”
When exaggeration rules, the public discussion rarely focuses on what actually is meant by the term"remedial course,” and whether one kind of educational deficiency is more serious than another. But now, the National Center for Education Statistics has published important data that allow us to sort out the numbers and describe some patterns in the ultimate educational attainment of students who enroll in remedial classes. Puncturing the overblown rhetoric also can lead to some principles for handling remediation in the future.
As part of"High School and Beyond,” a longitudinal study based on a national sample of the high-school graduating class of 1982, the center in 1993 gathered the college transcripts of students in the sample. From this data base, we know precisely when and where people enrolled in college, what they studied, how well they performed, and whether they had earned degrees by 1993. The data on degree completion and remediation were recently published in The Condition of Education, 1996.
Reflecting the academic careers of 2.45 million students in more than 2,500 institutions, the college transcripts make clear what qualifies a course as"remedial.” In mathematics, remedial means any course through the level of what high schools call"intermediate algebra.” In the area of English-language skills, remedial courses typically are labeled as “developmental,""basic,” or"tutorial.” English-as-a-second-language courses that carry no credit also are considered remedial.
The first lesson that one can learn from the transcripts is that the bulk of remedial work takes place in community colleges, which account for 56 per cent of the postsecondary enrollments in remedial reading, 80 per cent of those in pre-algebra mathematics (such as decimals and fractions), and 61 per cent of those in pre-college algebra.
These proportions are not unexpected; remediation is a traditional role of community colleges. They are flexible institutions, particularly useful for students who have belatedly figured out that their economic health depends on postsecondary education or for students who want to develop better study habits and attitudes than they had in high school. And community colleges know how to help determined students obtain degrees: Roughly three out of four people in the transcript study who earned associate’s degrees took remedial courses along the way.
The second lesson is that the extent of a student’s need for remediation is inversely related to his or her eventual completion of a degree. Of the students in the study who had earned more than a semester of college credits by 1993, 55 per cent of those who took no remedial courses, and 47 per cent of those who took only one remedial course, had earned a bachelor’s. However, only 24 per cent of those who took three or more remedial courses had earned a bachelor’s.
Thus, we should not worry about students who take only one remedial course. For a majority of them, it is a course in writing; for the rest, it is intermediate algebra. Deficiencies in writing one’s native language generally are “fixable.” After all, writing is generally the last of the language skills to be mastered when one studies a second language, and for good reason: If listening, speaking, and reading skills are in place, one has the tools to develop writing skills. What holds for a second language holds for one’s native tongue.
The data show that if a student needs remediation only in intermediate algebra, that is not cause for deep concern, either, provided that the student is motivated to learn. For example, the transcripts show that students seeking business degrees tend to conquer their deficiencies in algebra quickly, because the math requirements for a business degree are considerable, and students want to get on with the core of the program.
Reading, however, is another matter -- one that demands very serious attention if we are determined to help students earn bachelor’s degrees. Deficiencies in reading skills are indicators of comprehensive literacy problems, and they significantly lower the odds of a student’s completing any degree. One out of eight students in the national transcript study took remedial reading. Sixty-five per cent of those people found themselves in at least three other remedial courses, including mathematics -- where reading skills also count.
Our transcript data from the high-school class of 1982, as well as data that the N.C.E.S. previously gathered on the class of 1972, reveal distinct variations -- and shifts over time -- in the need for remedial-reading courses among students from various racial and ethnic groups. The data also show the effects of those needs on students’ likelihood of earning a bachelor’s degree. If educators are ever going to do the right thing for minority-group students, we must acknowledge and deal with these differences.
To determine changes in the rate at which students in our two transcript studies earned bachelor’s degrees, we focused on the people who were really trying to earn the degree: those who had earned more than a semester’s worth of credits by the time they were 30 and who had attended at least one four-year college.
In that group, we found that the proportion of white students taking remedial reading barely budged between the 1972 and 1982 samples, going from 6 to 7 per cent; their degree-completion rate held at 68 per cent for men and women. For Latino students, the proportion taking remedial reading rose significantly for men (from 10 to 17 per cent), but insignificantly for women (from 11 to 13 per cent), while the proportion earning a bachelor’s degree stayed flat for men, at 48 per cent, but rose for women, going from 38 to 50 per cent.
Especially troubling are the declining degree-completion rates among African Americans in our samples. They went from 47 to 44 per cent for men and from 50 to 36 per cent for women. In both cases, the extent of remedial education and its unhappy cornerstone in reading help explain the changes. The proportion of black men who enrolled in remedial reading jumped from 21 to 33 per cent between the samples; for women, the increase was even sharper -- from 20 to 41 per cent. One out of three black students in the 1982 sample who took remedial reading came from high schools in rural or suburban areas in the Southeast: the only distinct geographical pattern among students needing remediation, and one we cannot afford to ignore.
The need for remediation in reading certainly was not the only cause of changes in degree-completion rates between our two samples, but the findings strongly suggest that we cannot continue to let high-school graduates believe that they have a good chance of earning a college degree if they leave high school with poor reading skills. As any traveler on the electronic highway knows, the future is based as much on reading as was the past.
The remedial issue is thus more complex than windy rhetoric and simple solutions suggest. What can we do to solve the problems that students and institutions now face? The data suggest that:
* If a student requires remediation only in writing (or needs to repeat an intermediate-algebra course), four-year colleges can handle the problem quickly. They are not very efficient with more-daunting cases, and we defraud students if we pretend otherwise.
* Community colleges are better suited than four-year colleges to address a combination of multiple remedial needs and lingering adolescent attitudes toward education. To bolster their efforts, we must start valuing the associate’s degree more than we do now, for example by encouraging employers to seek people with such degrees and to advertise appropriate jobs with the phrase"associate’s degree required.” We have to show doubtful students that the credential means something in our economy, and that it is worth persisting through remediation to attain it.
* The comprehensive literacy problems that force students to take remedial-reading courses require solutions more far-reaching than even community colleges can provide. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley is rightly beating the drum for an increased focus on reading during students’ elementary and secondary schooling. Colleges can assist this effort in new ways.
For example, they might"adopt” elementary and middle schools that serve minority-group students and then place in students’ homes computer equipment and software that emphasizes a range of reading skills. Faculty members from high schools and colleges could go into the homes to tutor the students and try to engage parents, older siblings, or other relatives in the process of improving the students’ reading skills. Much research has shown that when families study together, learning improves. Faculty members could continue to work with the families through Internet e-mail programs. Such a distance-learning approach can be particularly useful in rural areas and developing suburbs.
Colleges might start their own secondary schools, using the existing premises of community-based organizations such as boys’ and girls’ clubs, granges, and churches. Members of such groups can be enlisted to tutor students and perform other activities. Such experiments already are under way in some localities.
Yes, efforts like these would cost colleges and community colleges money and time and require organizational changes. But they are cheaper -- and more equitable -- in the long run than investing in extensive remedial-education programs at colleges. No, we are not going to fix every student’s problems with reading and writing English. But if schools and colleges join in a concerted effort to raise our students’ basic literacy, the need for remediation in higher education should drop in direct proportion to the extent of the effort.
Clifford Adelman is a senior research associate in the U.S. Department of Education. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect the department’s positions.