Dive Brief:
- A new report from The Center for Community College Student Engagement fleshes out the gap between the portion of community college students who enroll believing they are prepared for success and those who actually are, highlighting innovative practices for supporting underprepared students.
- In a video interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, the center’s director, Evelyn Waiwaiole, discusses how many community colleges are working with feeder high schools to make sure more students are prepared and converting traditional developmental education programs to corequisite remediation that speeds up the path to a degree.
- While 87% of students nationwide take a single placement test, Waiwaiole sees schools making “real progress” by incorporating multiple measures, which is helpful for students straight from high school, and short, mandatory refreshers or sample tests in advance of the official placement can help returning students.
Dive Insight:
The underpreparedness of the student body is a massive problem in the nation’s community colleges. Nearly 70% of community college students place into some type of developmental education, which extends the time it takes them to get a degree and makes their overall education more expensive, hurting their chances of graduation.
Consensus has been growing around the need for better placement tests, especially for math. And corequisite remediation has become a darling of reformers, with impressive results coming out of several statewide efforts. In West Virginia, the portion of students in need of remedial English who went on to complete the associated gateway course rose from 37% to 68% in the shift from traditional to corequisite remediation. For math, the jump was from 14% to 62%.