Rising tuition is not the only barrier to college access. Each year, community colleges refer hundreds of thousands of new students to remedial courses in math or English before they can begin their college-level coursework. Only 34 percent of these students ever complete any type of college degree, leading many educators to wonder if remediation — which not only increases expenses but also delays students’ likely degree completion — has become a bridge to nowhere.
A growing number of states, including California, Connecticut, Florida, and Texas, have begun exempting more students from remediation or allowing them to complete remediation alongside their college-level courses as a corequisite. However, our recent study in Tennessee, with a team of researchers from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, suggests that there is a deeper problem with remediation: Students are neither improving their math skills nor increasing their chances of passing college-level math.
Tennessee has been a national innovator in reinventing remediation, launching the Seamless Alignment and Integrated Learning Support (Sails) program in 2012 as an alternative to college remediation. The goal of the program is to shift math remediation from college back to high school, allowing eligible students to fulfill their math remediation through an online course during their senior year under a teacher’s supervision. Those who complete the course are exempted from math remediation when they arrive at a Tennessee community college. Sails has scaled up over time to reach a majority of Tennessee high schools.
Our research on the impact of the program on students’ college-credit accumulation and math achievement taught us two important things:
First, Sails succeeded in shifting remediation efforts from colleges back to high school for many students. We observed large drops in the percentage of students placed into remedial courses in college, as well as large increases in the percentage of students enrolling directly in college-level math courses at Tennessee community colleges. Since Tennessee students are required to take four years of math in high school, the shift did not increase high-school math course-taking, making this a cost-saving strategy for taxpayers and, perhaps most important, college students.
Second, however, we learned that participation in the Sails program did not improve students’ math achievement nor boost their odds of passing college-level math. In sum, by moving the remedial course requirements to high school, the program substantially increased the proportion of community-college entrants taking college-level math directly, and about half of the new entrants passed. But, besides shifting the timing of remediation, the program did little to improve students’ chances of success.
Tennessee has the right idea in shifting remediation to high school and reducing the cost and delay of remediation on college campuses, but senior year of high school may be too late to start. As high schools have four years during which to increase the duration and intensity of remediation, they should be invited to develop and test alternative models. For instance, in a study of a double-period algebra course in the ninth grade in the Chicago Public Schools, researchers found not only positive impacts on algebra achievement, but also positive impacts on credits earned in high school, test scores, high-school graduation, and college enrollment rates.
Tennessee has the right idea in shifting remediation to high school, reducing the cost and delay in college, but senior year of high school may be too late to start.
Meanwhile, colleges need to identify and address the other barriers that are preventing students from graduating. For example, the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs offered students comprehensive advising, tutoring, and additional financial support, and, in a randomized trial, nearly doubled the proportion of students with an associate degree at the end of three years. Higher-education leaders will no doubt wonder where the money is going to come from to do so.
If policy makers move remediation to high school, as Tennessee has done with the Sails program, state legislatures should reimburse community colleges for the funds they had been collecting for remediation so that they can find better ways to provide college advising and student supports. Other institutions, such as Georgia State University, have been reaching out to students during the summer, redesigning their introductory math courses, and automating parts of their advising system to be more responsive. Community colleges should be testing similar approaches, tracking student outcomes, and scaling up the changes that improve completion.
Leaders in Tennessee are to be applauded not only for adopting a new approach to remediation, but also for taking the risk to assess its impact. American higher education has avoided taking a hard look at the benefits of remediation for far too long. If we cannot find a model that actually helps students, we should not just reduce the number of students referred to remediation or shift to corequisite courses — we should eliminate remediation entirely.
Angela Boatman is an assistant professor of public policy and higher education in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. Thomas J. Kane is an economist and a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research.
