By Hollie Daniels Sarica, Selena Cho, and Veronica Minaya
Gateway science courses remain a blind spot in higher education reform—they can serve as barriers that quietly, but powerfully, keep some students from advancing into high-demand STEM and health careers. While completion of such courses is one of the strongest predictors of persistence and degree completion, introductory science courses too often function as bottlenecks rather than gateways. Research shows that outdated placement practices, rigid prerequisite structures, and lecture-heavy instruction create unnecessary obstacles to success that may determine whether students ever reach the advanced classes that open doors to health and STEM professions.
The state of Ohio is poised to make headway on this challenge. Launched in spring 2024 and funded by Ascendium Education Group, the Ohio Strong Start in Science (OhioSSS) initiative is a partnership between the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE), CCRC, thirteen community colleges, and six public universities. The first statewide effort of its kind, OhioSSS seeks to transform placement, curriculum, and instruction in introductory science courses. OhioSSS supports colleges to redesign course structures and integrate supports into the first science gateway course required for students’ majors in anatomy and physiology (A&P), biology, and chemistry, with the aim of helping more students succeed on their first attempt. Faculty across two- and four-year institutions are leading this work, tailoring supports to disciplinary needs—strengthening math readiness in chemistry, bolstering reading comprehension in A&P, and reinforcing foundational concepts in biology.
“From a momentum perspective, we want students to progress from the point of entrance at a college or university and to move through their STEM major effectively without unnecessary barriers,” said Chris Kacir, ODHE’s associate vice chancellor for student success.
Origins of OhioSSS
ODHE modeled OhioSSS on its earlier Ohio Strong Start to Finish (OhioSSF) corequisite initiative in gateway English and math courses. Kacir noted that math corequisites not only benefit students by boosting their completion of gateway courses but also benefit institutions because the state funding formula emphasizes student success.
“Seeing the gains in math—and similar bottlenecks in A&P, biology, and chemistry—[the institutions] asked whether we could adapt [the corequisite initiative] for science,” he said.
After the English and math corequisite reform, ODHE surveyed participants in fall 2021 to learn what worked well and what did not work well, and applied those lessons to OhioSSS, said Tom Sudkamp, vice chancellor for academic affairs at ODHE. He emphasized that state-led oversight—paired with a regular cadence of campus progress reporting to ODHE—helped sustain implementation.
“We had quarterly reports … annual reports…. Without that seemingly large statewide oversight in the midst of the pandemic, these initiatives probably would have slipped,” he said.
But science disciplines are by nature different from English and math, so it is difficult to translate existing corequisite models to science courses. For one thing, placement into introductory science courses is often less formalized and more uneven across institutions. Colleges rely on varying mixes of test scores, high school science coursework, demonstrated proficiency in college-level math and English, and/or advisor or instructor approval. Unlike in English and math—where corequisites replaced long remedial sequences—science barriers often stem from unwritten advising practices that send many STEM-focused students into non-major introductory science courses, creating a de facto prerequisite that delays entry into the major sequence. Moreover, gateway science courses that require a lab already have longer contact hours, making it difficult for institutions to add hours for a corequisite support course. Additionally, the variation among OhioSSS institutions—spanning two-year and four-year, rural and urban, small and large, and single and multicampus colleges—makes it even more challenging to come up with standardized corequisite initiatives in gateway science courses.
How OhioSSS Is Organized and Early Progress
As colleges began designing their science corequisite courses, ODHE granted participating institutions the autonomy to experiment with and adopt the instructional supports and structures that were most appropriate, needed, and feasible for their contexts.
“Most corequisites tend to be some sort of support paired with a main course that helps students with a variety of skill development, as well as some remediation in the subject matter,” said OhioSSS Project Director Tom Dickson. “[It was] left fairly vague as to what supports and what structures were going to be recommended … because we wanted to leave it broad for each institution to be able to adapt it to their policies, their procedures, their circumstances, their politics.”
OhioSSS is faculty driven, with campus leads appointed to run local course redesigns, assemble campus teams, and coordinate with the OhioSSS project director. Statewide, the Ohio Biology Initiative (OBI) and Ohio Chemistry Initiative (OCI) convene campus leads and faculty from participating colleges for learning network sessions to share progress, compare data and materials, and troubleshoot. ODHE backs this with practical professional development and a clear reporting cadence. Grants also support planning activities, such as needs assessments, goal-setting, gateway course redesign, advising-pathway maps, and evaluation and policy frameworks.
Campuses selected gateway science courses in A&P, biology, and chemistry to focus on for this project and began laying out a plan for curricular reform by conducting a campus needs assessment in spring 2025. Institutions are considering a range of revisions to contact or credit hours, curriculum, instructional supports, and placement processes. Because approaches vary by context, the network emphasizes common goals with flexible paths from design to pilot, refinement, and scale. Some early pilots are enrolling students in one-credit-hour developmental-level corequisites taught by the same instructor as their gateway science course.
Building Momentum for Lasting Change
As the second year of OhioSSS progresses, the initiative is focused on designing corequisite science courses that can be integrated into policy, funding frameworks, and campus culture so they can live on after they are more widely implemented in fall 2026. That requires clarity about what corequisites in science should accomplish, commitment from faculty and administrators across campuses, and resources to sustain the work beyond seed funding. Dickson cautioned that lasting change requires campus-wide ownership.
“Those that have staying power will have those conversations, and people will connect with it and they will write it into policy,” he said. “Those that don’t have those conversations and don’t write it into policy—they will probably fizzle out and disappear once the champions of it disappear.”
But by embedding reforms into statewide frameworks and building faculty networks, ODHE is laying the foundation for durable change.
“We have institutions that are so enthusiastic, [some] are jumping the gun and [are already] piloting their courses,” Sudkamp said. At the colleges, he’s seeing “a lot of optimism and a lot of thanks for everyone involved.”
Funding for this project is provided by Ascendium Education Group.
