By Clifford Adelman
BEFORE ANYONE SEALS any more decisions on the future of remedial
courses in colleges and community colleges, it might be advisable to consider lessons
from some national data on the relationship between remediation and degree completion.
The data come from the college transcripts -- which don't lie about such matters
-- of the national high school class of 1982, which was followed through higher education
by the National Center for Education Statistics to 1993.
That long-term history allows people plenty of time to finish associate's or bachelor's
degrees, and it is degree completion that is the Dow Jones Industrial Average of
U.S. higher education.
There are five lessons from these data: 1) The amount of remedial work matters;
2) the type of remedial work matters even more; 3) the proportion of students requiring
remediation in college varies widely by geographic region and urbanicity of high
school; 4) the orange lights on future students in need of remediation start flashing
in high school -- and in the context of students' coursework, not grades; and 5)
we can fix some of the secondary school coursework problem, and thus begin to shrink
the remedial empires in higher education.
Let us focus only on those students who earned more than ten credits and attended
two-year and/or four-year colleges, thus excluding incidental students and those
who attended only trade schools (There is too much statistical noise in these groups
for a clean analysis). What is the highest undergraduate degree they earned by age
30?
| |
Earned Bachelor’s |
Earned Associate’s |
Total |
| No remedial courses |
54% |
6% |
60% |
| One course |
45 |
10 |
55 |
| Two courses |
31 |
14 |
45 |
| Three or four courses |
24 |
20 |
44 |
| Five or more courses |
20 |
15 |
35 |
| Three or more, including reading |
18 |
17 |
35 |
The first lesson, then, is that one remedial course affects both bachelor's and overall
degree completion rates a bit, but there are more serious consequences for students
taking more than one remedial.
If a student has a bad Algebra 2 course in high school, both four-year and two-year
colleges can fix the problem in one semester, maybe two. Even if the student evidences
a writing problem, one semester of high-intensity instruction can do the job -- two
semesters for students whose native language is not English, since writing is the
last of the four language skills people learn when they study a new language.
An allied lesson of this little table is that remediation is more of a way of
life at community colleges, where it is not a serious impediment to associate's degree
completion among those who make the effort.
The first lesson commands us to ask what kind of remediation is at issue.
Among students who had to take remedial reading, 66 percent were in three
or more other remedial courses, and only 12 percent of this group earned bachelor's
degrees. Among students who were in remedial reading for more than one course, nearly
80 percent were in two or more other remedial courses, and less than nine percent
earned bachelor's degrees.
No matter what the combination, the conclusion makes unfortunate sense: If you
can't read, you can't read the math problem either (let alone the chemistry textbook,
the historical documents or the business law cases).
The community college environment was more supportive for remedial reading students,
as 16 percent of them earned an associate's degree. But for those community college
students who were stuck in remedial reading for more than a year, the associate's
degree completion rate fell to less than five percent. This, too, is no surprise,
as more than half of the long-term remedial reading students in community colleges
also were enrolled in mathematics courses below the level of algebra 2.
Our third lesson involves the geographic concentration of remedial students in
terms of their high school origin. Where did those who took more than two remedial
courses in college come from, by census division and urbanicity of high school?
The reason we ask the question is that if we are going to fix the problem in the
pre-collegiate years, we have to know where to take our toolboxes. The most disproportionate
contributions to the national pool of remedial students were from the following areas:
| |
Proportion of
Remedial Students |
Proportion of
All Students |
| South Atlantic, suburban |
10.4% |
6.8% |
| Pacific, suburban |
9.6 |
8.3 |
| Mid-Atlantic, urban |
5.9 |
3.8 |
| East North Central, urban |
5.4 |
3.9 |
| South Atlantic, rural |
5.1 |
4.8 |
| West South Central, rural |
4.5 |
3.1 |
No doubt this table defies the conventional wisdom that only the vast numbers
of kids from inner city high schools need remediation. The real "vast numbers"
of U.S. college students graduated from suburban high schools, and suburban America
exhibits a good deal of variance in its socioeconomic composition and quality of
schooling.
Knowing where to take the toolbox is but a first step. Knowing which secondary
school performance indicators are the best guides to the most effective use of the
tools is a second.
In this respect -- as in so many others -- the nature of students' high school curriculum
(not grades or class rank, not test scores) is the best advanced warning sign.
Consider only those high school seniors who continued on to college. If we took
the top 40 percent of these students on each of three performance indicators, it
is obvious that class rank or academic grade point average will fool you far more
than the other indicators if you want to estimate the incoming college population
that is likely to wind up in remediation.
Besides, there's not much your toolbox can do to fix grades or class rank. On
the other hand, we can work on the intensity of curriculum (e.g. the amount of math
instruction and, more importantly, getting students beyond algebra 2), and
on increasing the proportion of non-school time that students use to work on that
curriculum.
|
Proportion of High School Seniors Who Took Remedial
Courses in College
(by Three Pre-College Proportion Indicators)
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
Academic Curriculum
Intensity |
Senior
Test Score |
Class Rank/
Academic GPA |
| Top 20% |
27.5% |
29.8% |
36.3% |
| Top 21- 40% |
48.4 |
50.4 |
53.8 |
The bottom line of this brief excursion is that "remediation" in higher
education is not some monolithic plague that can be cured with a single prescription.
Determined students and faculty can overcome at least mild deficiencies in preparation;
and students whose native language is not English certainly should be allowed the
same extra time and assistance in writing skills that I would expect if I went to
school in a non-English-speaking country.
But when reading is at the core of the problem, the odds of success in college
environments are so low that other approaches are called for. For example, every
college and community college can establish a community technology center in its
service area, where high school students can come after school, in evenings and on
weekends to work with intelligent systems or CDs delivering reading tutorials at
computer workstations. And total immersion summer programs employing group reading
of dramas also would prove a productive approach.
Both of these strategies involve peer support and interaction. These are the keys
to student engagement and involvement, and, ultimately, to the demise of remediation.
But until that happy day, let us be more sensible about the way we sort the problem
-- and the type of alternative investments we make in its solution.
Clifford Adelman is a visiting fellow at The College Board.
