Across the country, community colleges have been shifting away from traditional prerequisite remediation and moving toward corequisite supports. In the corequisite model, students directly enroll in a college-level course with built-in academic support, instead of taking a prerequisite noncredit remedial course. This avoids delays that keep many students from ever reaching credit courses. As of 2023, about 78% of two-year colleges offered corequisite courses in English and 77% offered corequisite courses in math.
Corequisite remediation has produced some of the largest improvements in gateway course completion among recent developmental education reforms. But the evidence shows that corequisite remediation is more effective at helping students complete their first college-level math or English course than improving their longer-term persistence or likelihood of degree attainment. As states begin extending corequisite approaches beyond math and English, that distinction matters. Ohio’s Strong Start in Science (OhioSSS) initiative provides an opportunity to ask whether the corequisite model can be adapted to gateway science courses and, perhaps more importantly, which features of these models can help students maintain momentum through STEM and health pathways.
What OhioSSS Can Help Us Learn
Ohio is the first state to launch a statewide initiative bringing corequisite approaches to gateway science courses. OhioSSS is a partnership between the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE), CCRC, 13 community colleges, and seven public universities. The state is supporting each institution as it designs a corequisite model and chooses which components are most relevant to its campus. Some colleges will use a standard corequisite model, which includes enrolling students who do not meet prerequisite requirements directly in the course with a paired support section. Others will choose variations, such as adding time to the course for all students; repurposing existing lecture, lab, or recitation time for just-in-time support; or redesigning curricula and teaching without changing course hours.
That variation creates an opportunity to explore which models colleges can successfully implement, which students they reach, and how differences in design relate to student experiences and outcomes.
Gains in Gateway Course Completion
Existing research suggests that corequisites might be a promising approach for building momentum through STEM pathways. Causal evidence consistently shows that corequisites improve students’ completion of gateway math and English courses. In one of the earliest randomized controlled trials of corequisite models, conducted at three community colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, students placed in college-level statistics with support were 16 percentage points more likely to pass than students placed in remedial algebra. In Tennessee’s statewide corequisite model, corequisite students were 15 percentage points more likely to complete gateway math and 18 percentage points more likely to complete gateway English. The gains held even among students who scored the furthest below the placement cutoff. Relatedly, in a Texas study of English corequisites, outcomes improved for Hispanic students, first-generation students, and students whose first language was not English. Overall, the evidence provides a strong case that replacing prerequisite remediation with direct access to college-level coursework with support can substantially increase students’ chances of getting through gateway courses.
Gateway Gains Do Not Always Translate Into Longer-Term Gains
The effects of corequisite remediation on completing later coursework are smaller and less consistent than those on completing gateway courses. In Tennessee, students in corequisite math were just 5 percentage points more likely than prerequisite students to pass a subsequent math course; in English, corequisite students were more likely to enroll in the next course but no more likely to pass it. Corequisite students also attempted more college-level credits, on average, in their first two years, but by year three that gap was no longer significant.
Most studies have found that corequisites have mixed or limited effects on persistence and degree attainment. One study found that, compared to similar students placed in prerequisite courses, corequisite students were 4.3 percentage points more likely to stop out by the end of their third year and 3 percentage points less likely to earn any credential within three years. However, a notable exception has been CUNY, where students in the corequisite statistics course were more likely to transfer and graduate; seven years later, among students who completed a degree within two years, corequisite students earned between $13,600 and $17,600 more annually than students placed in prerequisite algebra. These findings suggest that strong short-term effects can translate into longer-term gains, but they also raise an important question: Why do those longer-term effects emerge in some settings and not others?
Corequisite Models Can Include Different Components
One challenge in interpreting this evidence is that corequisite remediation is an umbrella term for interventions that differ substantially in terms of structure, intensity, content, and delivery, as well as in who is placed into them. As a result, estimates of the effects of corequisites do not necessarily tell us which components of the model produced those effects.
One important variable is the integration of support into gateway instruction. In CUNY’s model, there was close coordination between faculty, workshop peer facilitators, and research staff, including regular check-in meetings and a common syllabus across sections, which could help explain the longer-term effects found there. The nature of academic support also differed across studies. The CUNY model had weekly two-hour academic workshops led by peer facilitators. Tennessee institutions were required to submit academic support plans to the Tennessee Board of Regents, but their delivery formats were more flexible and included fully in-person, hybrid, and online models. The models in Texas also varied across institutions, including paired courses, extended instructional time, accelerated learning programs, tutor-supported models, and technology-mediated support structures.
These differences between models may help explain why longer-term effects vary across settings, but they also mean that existing studies cannot isolate the contribution of any single component. The evidence therefore tells us much more about the effects of the overall models than about whether particular features, such as structured weekly workshops, extended instructional time, or technology-mediated support, are responsible for the gains.
Extending Corequisites to Science Courses
OhioSSS extends the approach of prior corequisite models to introductory courses for science majors (i.e., Biology I, Anatomy & Physiology I, and Chemistry I) in community colleges and public universities. Extending corequisite approaches to science courses raises a new set of questions. Among STEM majors, poor performance in STEM courses is associated with students stopping out of college, and students from low-income backgrounds, first-generation students, and students of color tend to be disproportionately affected.
Science also creates implementation challenges that differ from those related to math and English. Placement into introductory science courses is less formalized and more uneven across institutions than placement into math and English courses. Additionally, gateway science courses often require a lab with set contact hours, which makes it difficult to add time for a supplemental academic support session. OhioSSS institutions are responding with different models, including paired support sections, extended instructional time, just-in-time support embedded in existing class periods, and broader curricular redesigns. With implementation starting this academic year, OhioSSS will provide early evidence on how other states can approach science gateway reform.
