As many as one-third of college-bound students are graduating from high school unprepared for higher-level classes, requiring remedial college courses teaching basic skills and costing colleges and taxpayers around $2.5 billion, according to Strong American Schools.
In a September study by the nonprofit organization, which tracked students who graduated from public high schools and continued on to public universities, many college students who required remedial college classes earned a high school diploma with relative ease.
“It’s not just kids who are C students from bad schools in the inner city that need remediation,” Strong American Schools Policy Director Adam Thibault said. “It’s a problem that’s affecting middle class, middle America.”
Insufficient data on the cost of remediation prompted Strong American Schools to undertake the study, Thibault said.
A survey in the study found nearly four out of five students enrolled in basic skills classes graduated from high school with a 3.0 GPA or higher. Almost 60 percent of students taking remedial classes said their high school classes were easy, according to the survey.
Despite the high cost of remediation, the study found such programs ineffective in helping students graduate on time, or at all. Only 19 percent of college students in the class of 1992, who took three to four remedial classes in college, received a bachelor’s degree by 2000, according to the study.
Boston Public Schools are working to prepare students for success in college with new “key strategies,” BPS spokeswoman Melissa Duggan said in an email. BPS is expanding its Advanced Placement class offerings and attempting to establish International Baccalaureate Programs in two high schools. Both programs allow students to take college-level classes while still in high school, Duggan said.
The study found that even difficult high school classes are not always enough to ensure students are ready for college level work, as most students polled in the study said that they took the hardest classes offered at their high school.
Duggan said BPS now offers dual enrollment programs at several high schools, which enable high school students to take college-level classes at local colleges.
“This allows students to access college credit and also helps them build confidence in themselves that they belong in college and can be successful in college,” she said in an email.
Although college-provided remediation classes may be ineffective, Thibault said high schools are failing to deliver diplomas with value, and colleges and high schools need to work together to align their curricula so students will succeed when they reach the university level.
Though Thibault said responses to the report have been positive, the word “remedial” has bothered some in higher education.
“That word has a real bad spin on it,” University of Massachusetts-Amherst spokesman Patrick Callahan said. “That term implies that [the university is] letting people into school that aren’t qualified, and that’s not true.”
UMass does not offer remedial classes, but students transferring from two-year community colleges to the university may have received basic skills training while at the two-year institutions, Callahan said.
“The word definitively has a stigma attached to it,” Thibault said. “But what remediation essentially means is having to take math or language arts classes that are below college level.”
Schools that offer what the report deemed “remedial” classes may instead call them basic or development classes, he said.
All classes offered at Boston University are college-level classes, BU spokesman Colin Riley said.
