Noncredit developmental education in colleges comes from a good place, but is it really helping our students? Research on developmental education reforms makes a simple point: Students do better when we let them in, not when we sort them out. For many years, Onondaga Community College (OCC) has been exploring the best way to help students who are tagged as unprepared for college-level courses, and we want to share our insights with you. Spoiler alert: When we got rid of dev ed in English and reading, putting all incoming students directly into credit-bearing, first-year composition (FYC) courses, we saw dramatic improvements in student success on average across all students who would have been placed into dev ed.
The Rise of Corequisites and OCC’s Early Reform
In 2009, the English faculty at OCC took notice of the publication of The Accelerated Learning Program: Throwing Open the Gates, by Peter Adams and his colleagues at the Community College of Baltimore County. Many of the students entering our “traditional” (aka, prerequisite) dev ed courses were either not making it through or, if they did complete, not registering for FYC. This foundational journal article sparked a national movement to reform developmental education through the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) model. In ALP, students are accelerated through developmental composition by enrolling in a corequisite support course linked with the college-level FYC course, plugging the leaky pipeline between developmental education and FYC. Instead of taking standalone, decontextualized developmental education courses, students in the ALP model enrolled concurrently in the three-credit FYC and a three-equivalent-credit support course. Students were able to start credit-bearing coursework immediately and have the extra time on task and support needed to complete assignments in their credit composition course.
And it worked. Research by CCRC showed the efficacy of coreqs and helped propel the coreq model into a national reform movement. OCC faculty in English were excited by the possibilities of coreq dev ed, piloting a handful of coreq sections in 2013 and scaling to 100% by spring 2017. Coreq at OCC improved outcomes for all students and helped to shrink the performance gap between White students and students of color.
What Long-Term Data Revealed at OCC
But when we looked at how students were doing over time, we found something deeply troubling. Although coreqs significantly increased success rates for developmental education students taking FYC, coreq students handed back the lion’s share of those gains as they moved further and further from the coreq experience, graduating at only marginally higher rates than students who took prerequisite dev ed. Either an alarmingly high percentage of our students were just never going to be ready for college-level work (a proposition that did not sit well with us both ethically and as faculty working at an open-access community college), or the very act of placement itself was having an impact.
As with the Community College of Baltimore County’s model, OCC’s dev ed system required students to take be in class for an extra three hours a week that did not count toward graduation, along with the three-credit FYC required of all majors. Participation in the program used up financial aid on nondegree credits, took up an additional course slot in the student’s first semester, and, despite faculty’s best efforts, was still experienced as stigmatizing by many students. That raised a question: For which students would the advantages of coreq outweigh the disadvantages?
When Placement Accuracy Reinforces Inequity
With an eye toward improving placement accuracy, OCC changed placement methodologies throughout the course of its coreq journey. Like many colleges, OCC initially relied on third-party placement testing, shifted to multiple measures, and, finally, used overall high school GPA as a single metric.
Refining placement metrics reduced overall rates of placement into noncredit English from 39% of the incoming class in fall 2011 to 13% in fall 2019 with little to no change in success rates for FYC. We were excited by these results, but, even as placement became more “accurate,” inequity in placement and outcomes remained and even grew. For example, in fall 2019, 37% of all the students in the English coreq classes were Black, but Black students accounted for only 20% of the total student body. Fewer overall students were placed into noncredit coreq, but Black students were placed into these classes at a disproportionately higher rate.
Eliminating Placement and Redesigning First-Year Composition
Was coreq just a better way of doing essentially the same thing as prereq dev ed, and, if so, was placement itself the issue? Our internal analysis suggested it was. English and reading faculty did away with placement and dev ed altogether, redesigning the FYC course to have the best chance of supporting all students. The new course drew heavily from the coreq pedagogy, with its explicit emphasis on holistic student success, as well as an explicit integration of reading and writing. The newly redesigned FYC course was introduced at 100% scale in fall 2020, effectively eliminating noncredit classes and placement in English and reading while continuing to support those students who needed it most.
So, what happened once OCC removed placement and redesigned FYC? The results were striking. Fifty-seven percent of FYC students earned a C or better in 2015–2016, when developmental education was offered as a prereq with limited coreq piloting, increasing to 60% in 2017–2019, when all developmental English was offered as coreq. In 2020–2023, after dev ed English and reading were eliminated, it increased to 64%. In terms of those students who would have been placed into dev ed using an overall high school GPA of below 75 as our metric, 27% of those students earned a C or better in 2015-2016, and 32% did so in 2017-2019. After placement was eliminated in 2020, 35% of students with an overall high school GPA of below 75 earned a C or better in FYC.
Since 2020, pass rates for all students in the redesigned composition course match or surpass previous semesters with prereq or coreq. This holds true for all demographic groups.
Percentage of Students With C or Better in First-Year Composition (FYC)
When looking at course-level success rates in FYC, there is little question that the revisions made over the last several years have been effective in helping more students earn college credit for FYC than previous models, saving them both time and money. In doing so, OCC has increased success rates for the most vulnerable students while maintaining or even slightly increasing success rates for those students who were considered “prepared” for college-level writing in our old placement system. See this update in Teaching English in the Two-Year College for more details.
Continuing the Conversation
All colleges, but especially community colleges, are dealing with declining enrollment and graduation rates that are not where we want or need them to be. While what we did may not be the best approach for every college, regardless of context, every program should look carefully at placement and assess if the benefits really outweigh the costs.
Our experience at OCC shows what becomes possible when faculty interrogate long-held assumptions about readiness and build structures that assume a student’s potential. And we want you to join this conversation. We are happy to share our assessment methodology, new course structure, or anything else you may want to know.
For more information or just to share your thoughts, contact me at choseedm@sunyocc.edu.
