Reforming Remediation: College Students Mainstreamed into Statistics Are More Likely to Succeed

IMAGINE THIS: You pass your high-school classes, graduate, and enroll in college. When you get to campus, you're told to take placement tests in English and math. The questions range from basic grammar to advanced algebra, drawing on lessons from years ago. You don't pass, and are suddenly shunted into an expensive academic purgatory: remedial classes. The required courses take time and tuition dollars but don't count toward graduation. It's a widespread problem. Across the United States, more than half of entering freshmen discover they are ineligible for college-level coursework each year, most commonly in math. The readiness gap is widest when considering students at nonselective two-year colleges, and students who are black, Hispanic, or from low-income families. And it often spells disaster for students looking to earn a degree: among community college students needing remediation, an estimated 30 percent don't ever enroll in required remedial courses, most don't pass the courses they do take, and just 1 in 10 graduates within three years. How can colleges and policymakers better support students assigned to remediation and improve their rates of college completion? One way would be to boost pass rates in remedial math courses, which may be the single largest academic barrier to college success. Colleges across the country are also experimenting with interventions such as mainstreaming, whereby students assessed as needing remediation are placed directly into a college-level course, sometimes with additional academic support. Although prior studies of mainstreaming have produced mixed results, none have used experimental methods to gain a clear picture of its effectiveness. Here we present new results from a randomized controlled trial of mainstreaming at three community colleges at the City University of New York (CUNY). Some entering students who ordinarily would have been assigned to a remedial elementary-algebra class were placed instead in a college-level statistics course and provided with extra academic support. We find that the students placed directly in college-level statistics did far better than their counterparts in remedial classes, even when students in remedial classes were also given extra support. They were more likely to pass their initial math course and, three semesters after the experiment, had completed more college credits overall. In short, our study suggests that many students consigned to remediation can pass credit-bearing quantitative courses right away. The CUNY Experiment CUNY's challenges with remedial education mirror national patterns: 76 percent of new community-college freshmen were assessed as needing remediation in the fall of 2014, based largely on college-administered placement tests. Many students assigned to remedial courses delay or simply never complete them, and the pass rate among those who do complete is only 38 percent in the highest-level remedial mathematics course. Among such students entering CUNY in 2011, just 7 percent graduated within three years, compared to 28 percent of other students. In the fall of 2013, we conducted a randomized controlled trial at three CUNY community colleges aimed at assessing the effects of the mainstreaming approach to remediation, in which students are placed directly into college-level courses. Incoming students assessed as needing remediation were randomly assigned to one of three course types: traditional remedial elementary algebra; the same algebra course with an additional two-hour weekly workshop; or a college-level statistics class with an additional two-hour weekly workshop. Only students enrolled in the college-level statistics class would earn college credit if they passed. We limited our sample to freshmen intending to major in disciplines not requiring college-level algebra, and to students who were assessed as needing mathematics remediation (based primarily on their performance on the college-placement COMPASS exam). …