Money, Research, and Remedial Education Reform

The most recent Nation’s Report Card revealed that only forty percent of high school graduates are really ready for college level work. Colleges have known this for a long time. Nationwide, the majority of community college students are required to take at least one remedial course, but less than one quarter of those same students will actually graduate with a credential of any kind within eight years.

A few weeks ago I released a paper, How to Fix Remediation at Scale, focused on one way to address this problem: co-requisite remediation. In co-requisite remediation, students receive learning support at the same time they are enrolled in college-level courses. This allows them to speed through remediation instead of being stuck for semesters of courses that don’t count towards their degree. In the paper, I pointed out the dismal record of the current remedial system and outlined the early successes of the co-requisite model. I also laid out the levers states have used to scale co-requisite remediation statewide. What I did not address was the costs associated with the change in remedial structures for colleges.

Merely a week later, Community College Research Center (CCRC) released a paper on this very topic: Is Corequisite Remediation Cost-Effective? Early Findings From Tennessee.  The paper added an important perspective on the financial burden colleges face when implementing co-requisite remediation. But there were two issues that weren’t addressed in the paper that could have made it even stronger: What money might students save through co-requisite reform? And, what is the research base supporting the model?

The CCRC paper used Tennessee’s data to calculate how much more money it cost colleges to implement co-requisite remediation and whether it is worth the investment. They found that under the co-requisite model the support or remedial course cost an average of $100 more per student while the college level course cost about $30 more per student. They also estimated that the one-time transition cost per subject area--or the price institutions face to flip their current remedial offering to a co-requisite model--is approximately $10,000.

The biggest cost increase came from additional students needing to take the college level course. Four times more students were successful at passing the college-level course in the math and almost twice as many were successful in writing. This meant providing a lot more college level classes. But the cost per completion of the gateway course was cut in half for math and 11 percent for writing. So while the college was paying more, the efficiency of the system was improved overall.

But what about the cost for students? It would have been even more compelling if CCRC had included student tuition in their analysis to show if students saved money as well as time with the co-requisite model. The cost of remediation for students and families has received a lot of attention lately and that information is helping to spur remediation reform. The same week CCRC released their paper, Education Reform Now released a paper that found “over half a million students and their families had to pay a combined $1.5 billion and borrow $380 million to pay for educational content they should have learned in high school.” This is a significant financial burden and adds more compelling evidence that the current system of remedial education is broken. Doing an analysis of how the co-requisite model effects this financial burden faced by students would be very beneficial to the field.

The CCRC paper also states that “the corequisite model has not yet been subjected to rigorous evaluation.” But there has been some rigorous evaluation. For example, Alexandra Logue, Mari Watanabe-Rose, and Daniel Douglas from City University of New York conducted a large randomized control trial with 907 CUNY students identified as needing remediation in math. They tested whether the co-requisite model in math was an improvement over standalone remedial classes. The results were that students passed the college level math class with support (the co-requisite model) at a higher rate (56 percent) than either the traditional standalone remedial class (39 percent) or the remedial class with a support component (45 percent). While this study alone is not conclusive, rounding up the rigorous evidence that does exist could help the field with a more complete picture of the co-requisite model.

The new CCRC analysis added an important institutional finance dimension to the literature on co-requisite remediation. It would have been even stronger if it had addressed the money students might save in the co-requisite model and reviewed the literature evaluating the reform. "