Starting community college students in college-level classes, with extra remedial help, has increased the number of students passing entry-level classes -- but the popular reform hasn't raised graduation rates, according to a long-term study of Tennessee students writes Jill Barshay on the Hechinger Report.
In 2009, when President Obama called for raising graduation rates, two-thirds of community college students and 40 percent of four-year college students were unprepared for college-level work, she notes. They were placed in no-credit remedial prerequisites. Many quit or failed, never making it to entry-level college-level courses.
To eliminate the “remedial ed trap,” colleges began to let poorly prepared students start in college-level classes with “corequisite” remediation -- a basic skills class or a math lab -- rather than prerequisite help. "In recent years, more than 20 states, from California to Florida, have either replaced remedial classes at their public colleges with corequisites or given students a choice between the two," writes Barshay.
Tennessee eliminated remedial prerequisites in 2015 at state colleges. More community college students are passing introductory courses in English and math, as well as more advanced courses. But they're not going the distance.
By the end of their third year -- most community college students take a lot more than two years -- "students had racked up about the same number of total credits as earlier students had under the old remedial education regime," she writes. Graduation rates for two-year and four-year degrees didn't increase.
Furthermore, students with low test scores were "less likely to earn a short-term certificate degree after the switch to corequisites." They dropped out.
In short, the higher achievers benefit, but only temporarily, said Alex Goudas, a higher education researcher and a community college professor at Delta College in Michigan. "Other students are harmed permanently.”
I wrote about the reforms when I edited a community college blog for Hechinger. It became clear fairly quickly that almost-ready students would do better starting at the college level, with extra support. Their failure rates were high but they went farther than similar students who started at the remedial level. It's discouraging that doesn't lead to long-term success.
It also became clear that weaker students would be overwhelmed.
Earlier this year, I linked to a defense of remedial math classes by Gerald Arnell Williams, who teaches math at San Juan College in New Mexico. Eliminating remedial math" is like "trying to learn how to swim and play water polo simultaneously," he writes. Those who really, truly can't swim are likely to drown.
Many community college students are unprepared, says the study's lead researcher, Florence Xiaotao Ran, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. High school achievement has fallen even more since 2020, when her study ended, she adds. “It’s the K-12 system that failed them.”
Even under the best of conditions, I'm sure a lot of these students are woefully unprepared. Can you imagine going to, say, nursing school in community college and being asked to titrate a drug when you never really "got" algebra (but got an B in the class due to easy homework, tests that don't count too much toward final grade, etc)? You would be hopelessly stuck. Sure, you could take a remedial class, but who says the standards will be any higher there?
Yes, K-12 failed these students, because they ended up in community college without enough background to be successful. Teachers may not have lowered standards because they wanted to. We've seen article after article go by here abo…
“It’s the K-12 system that failed them.” Is it? Did the K-12 system fail them, or did they fail? Why did those K-12 teachers give these students high math grades (if, indeed, that's what happened), only for those students to find out they're unprepared? Yes, there are some exceptions, but teachers don't generally lower standards because they want to.