New A2B (Associate’s to Bachelor’s) Website for Transfer Projects

Three Compatible Reforms for Increasing College Success: Corequisite Math Remediation, Dana Center Mathematics Pathways, and Guided Pathways

Reposted from the blog of the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (CAPR) by permission.

We are living in a time of substantial curricular reform at community colleges. Multiple approaches are being tested and used to try to increase what have traditionally been low course pass rates and low graduation rates. Nationally, the three-year community college graduation rate is only 38 percent, and the six-year graduation rate for bachelor’s degree students is only 67 percent. It can be confusing trying to distinguish between all of the curricular innovations taking place. This post discusses three such approaches—guided pathways, the Dana Center Mathematics Pathways (DCMP), and corequisite math remediation—including what they have in common and how they are mutually compatible. Guided pathways, DCMP, and corequisite math remediation take a complementary approach to clearing the obstacles to student success, and they can be used together to provide comprehensive reform that maximizes student success.

Three Curricular Reforms

Guided Pathways

In 2015, Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins of the Community College Research Center, published Redesigning America’s Community Colleges. This book heralded what is known as the guided pathways approach, which “starts with students’ end goals in mind and then rethinks and redesigns programs and support services to enable students to achieve these goals” (p. 16). The guided pathways approach contrasts with what the authors call the “cafeteria” approach, in which students are offered “an array of often-disconnected courses, programs, and support services that students are expected to navigate mostly on their own” (p. 3). Adoption of a guided pathways approach has been associated with increased student retention and graduation rates. For example, such an approach is at the heart of the curriculum of Guttman Community College, a college of the City University of New York (CUNY). At Guttman, first-year students’ courses are largely predetermined. Subsequently, students’ courses largely depend on their majors, which students declare during their first year. Guttman’s most recent three-year graduation rate is 46 percent, far higher than what is typical for community colleges.

Dana Center Mathematics Pathways

The goal of the DCMP approach, developed by the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, is to ensure that “all students benefit from well-designed math pathways that are aligned to their programs of study regardless of their placement level or type of institution of higher education.” Most colleges require that students take some sort of quantitative course or courses in order to graduate. In the DCMP approach, those courses focus on the type of math (whether it be remedial or college-level) most relevant to students’ field of study. For example, psychology majors take statistics, while physics majors take courses in the algebra–calculus sequence. In this way, the DCMP approach has goals that are similar to those of the guided pathways approach but focused on math courses instead of the entire curriculum. Further, the DCMP model is designed to “accelerate student progress toward completion” and “integrate student learning supports.” Initial examinations by CAPR show that the DCMP approach significantly increases course pass rates.

Corequisite Math

Finally, corequisite math remediation is a method of structuring courses in which students who have been assessed as lacking some of the math skills they need for college-level work are placed into a college-level class but with extra support. That extra support is carefully designed to help students acquire and use the skills that they need to succeed in the associated college-level course. This has been described as “just-in-time” academic support.

Commonalities Among These Three Approaches

In all three cases—guided pathways, DCMP, and corequisite math remediation—first a student’s academic goal is determined (to graduate, to learn a certain area of quantitative knowledge, or to pass a particular quantitative course), and then a student is provided with academic experiences and supports designed to lead a student directly to that goal. Given these commonalities, it is no surprise that corequisite math remediation is sometimes a part of guided pathways and of DCMP reforms. However, these three reforms differ in terms of the sampling unit of a student’s experience—the student’s whole curriculum, the student’s overall math curriculum, or a single math course taken by the student.

A specific example illustrating how these three approaches can overlap is the randomized controlled trial of corequisite remediation that I conducted with my colleagues Mari Watanabe-Rose and Dan Douglas. The students in this experiment had all been assessed as needing math remediation, and none needed college algebra for their intended majors. These students were randomly assigned to a traditional, remedial, prerequisite course (elementary algebra) or to college-level introductory statistics with additional support (corequisite remediation). Thus, the two treatments differed not only in the absence or presence of corequisite math remediation but also in whether the quantitative course was aligned with students’ academic goals (similar to DCMP). The pass rate for the statistics course was 56 percent, compared with 39 percent for the remedial course, and three years later the graduation rate for the students randomly assigned to statistics was 8 percentage points higher than that of the students randomly assigned to elementary algebra.

Another example of how the three approaches can be applied is PRIME (Project for Relevant and Improved Mathematics Education), a project funded by the Teagle Foundation and involving four community colleges at CUNY. PRIME’s goal is to streamline and align students’ quantitative curricula from remedial courses through introductory college-level courses that require quantitative skills, including natural and social science courses. One participating institution, Hostos Community College, recently developed a corequisite statistics course that adds extra support (including algebra topics as needed) to a traditional introductory college-level statistics course. This course is being offered to those students who have been assessed as needing that extra support. As a next step, Hostos is going to combine this corequisite statistics course with an introductory college-level psychology course, providing students with even more opportunities to connect the material in the different courses and to make significant progress toward their degrees. For students who have been assessed as needing math remediation and whose majors require both introductory statistics and psychology, such a course combination exemplifies elements of corequisite remediation, DCMP, and guided pathways.

How These Reforms Promote Student Success

There are many reasons why these three approaches can enhance student success. First, evidence suggests that students work harder and are more motivated to learn material when the material is aligned with their other interests. For example, in our randomized controlled trial of corequisite math remediation, the statistics students were more likely to form their own study groups and to attend extra workshops.

Another reason that these approaches can enhance student success is that, similar to other animals, humans prefer more immediate rewards. Therefore, anything that makes the reward of graduation seem closer to students will make graduation worth more to them, and will result in students being more likely to choose to engage in actions to obtain that reward instead of choosing to do something else for a different reward (such as taking a time-consuming job for money). A clear path to graduation, with every course taking you one step nearer, makes the reward of graduation seem closer.

Guided pathways, DCMP, and corequisite remediation all (1) work backward from students’ goals in order to structure academic experiences so that they move students most efficiently toward those goals and (2) take advantage of the increased motivation that can occur when academic activities are aligned with academic interests and when students progress clearly and steadily toward the goal line. These three approaches are mutually compatible and applicable, have significant evidence supporting them, and if applied together are highly likely to greatly enhance student success.

ACE Blog Post About Transfer Panel at Conference

The American Council on Education has posted on its blog a piece regarding a panel (titled “Strengthening Transfer Pathways to Improve Student Success”) in which I participated along with John Fink of the Community College Research Center, Chris Mullin of Strong Start to Finish, and Jon Turk of ACE (the moderator) at the ACE 2018 conference.

One Transfer Student’s Experience

The transfer experience of a recent college graduate named Ben illustrates well some of the points made about college credit transfer and the experiences of transfer students in my new book, Pathways to Reform:  Credits and Conflict at The City University of New York.

After graduating from a good private high school in Brooklyn, New York, Ben first attended Berklee College of Music in Boston to study jazz guitar performance.  However, soon after beginning college there, he left Berklee with a low GPA.

After working for a few years, Ben knew he wanted to obtain a bachelor’s degree, but his Berklee GPA wasn’t high enough for him to gain admission to a selective bachelor’s-degree college.  Cost was also a consideration in his continuing his education.

Ben had heard from a friend who was attending Borough of Manhattan Community College of The City University of New York (BMCC of CUNY) that the classes there were good.  BMCC is an open admissions institution.  In addition, the cost of attending BMCC is relatively low, and the location was convenient for Ben (he worked in Manhattan and lived in Brooklyn).  Therefore Ben decided to try a couple of (nonmatriculated) classes there.  The courses went well, so the next semester he matriculated. He was interested in research psychology that could help to improve people’s lives, but BMCC did not have a psychology major, so he matriculated as a liberal arts major. BMCC provided Ben with a second chance at postsecondary education.

From the beginning of his time at BMCC, Ben was thinking about his transfer goal, and was worried about whether or not his credits would transfer.  He was concerned that some colleges might not take his community college credits.  He went to see a BMCC advisor about this.  She pulled out a sheet showing which BMCC courses would transfer to which CUNY senior (bachelor’s-degree) colleges, and advised him to take courses on the sheet (e.g., social psychology) that would transfer for his intended bachelor’s degree in psychology.  This was useful information, but it was limited information, was not personalized to Ben’s situation, and did not help him to think about all of the possibilities open to him.  For more information, the advisor advised Ben to contact the colleges to which he was interested in applying, a time-consuming and potentially complex and frustrating task that Ben was not inclined to do.

From exposure to people with bachelor’s degrees, Ben knew that many people did not value associate-degree courses (such as are offered at BMCC) as much as bachelor’s-degree courses. Given his ultimate goal of a bachelor’s degree, Ben prioritized taking courses that he thought would transfer to a bachelor’s-degree program over courses that would obtain him the BMCC liberal arts associate’s degree.  So, for example, he did not take a required speech course at BMCC, because he was worried it would not transfer.

Nevertheless, Ben enjoyed his BMCC classes and thought that the professors were good.  His professor for a writing class, in which Ben was doing well, took him aside and asked “What are you doing here?”  Ben told the professor that his goal was to transfer and receive a bachelor’s degree.  The professor told him that some of his previous students had transferred to Columbia, and reminded Ben of BMCC’s motto (which is: “Start here.  Go anywhere.”).

Ben was interested in transferring to Queens College of CUNY (where his parents attended college) or Stony Brook University (of the State University of New York).  But, because of his professor’s advice, he also applied to Columbia University’s College of General Studies (GS, a division of Columbia for students who have had at least a one-year break in their college educations).  He was accepted to Columbia’s GS and so decided to attend there.  GS students have the same course requirements as students who begin at Columbia as freshmen.

A recent study by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that, on average, students lose 43% of their credits when they transfer.  However, there is a great deal of variation. As described in my new book, around the time that Ben transferred from BMCC to GS, CUNY had just been through a contentious period establishing a set of policies (called Pathways) that would guarantee course credit transfer, including for general education and some major courses, among the 19 undergraduate colleges of CUNY.  Until then, for example, some courses taken as general education (core) courses at one CUNY college would count only as electives at another CUNY college.

In contrast, when Ben transferred to GS at Columbia University, of the credits that he had accumulated at Berklee and BMCC, Columbia took the maximum that their policies allowed:  60 of the 124 required for receipt of a Columbia bachelor’s degree.  In addition, many of these credits were taken by Columbia in fulfillment of its general education and psychology major requirements. So at the same time that students were having trouble transferring courses from one college to another within CUNY, which is a single university according to New York State Education Law, Ben had no difficulty transferring his credits from BMCC to Columbia, an apparent bolstering of the anecdotal evidence described in my new book that, prior to Pathways, it was easier to transfer outside of CUNY than within CUNY.

Unlike transfer students at many colleges, upon transferring to Columbia, Ben was required to attend orientation.  He started at GS in the spring, and was in a cohort of a couple hundred new GS students, which he felt added significantly to his making a positive transition to Columbia.  There were many other supports available to him at Columbia (e.g. tutoring).

While working expeditiously on obtaining his Columbia bachelor’s degree, Ben, with his interest in research psychology, looked at the Columbia website for good research opportunities.  There he came across the Community College Research Center, which is based at Columbia’s Teachers College.  CCRC particularly intrigued Ben because of his experience at BMCC.  He reached out to CCRC and subsequently began working there part-time while still in college.

Now, after starting his postsecondary experience at Berklee College of Music and BMCC, Ben is the recipient of a Columbia University bachelor’s degree (for which he spent far less money than had he started there as a freshman).  And he is working full-time for a nonprofit organization helping to conduct research on increasing postsecondary students’ success.

As Ben made his way along the path from first entry to college to college graduation, he received advice from the several institutions that he attended.  However, he cannot imagine having navigated that path successfully if he had not had parents who were college graduates.  Students who are the first in their families to attend college have even more challenges to overcome in reaching graduation than did Ben.

In summary, among other lessons, Ben’s experience shows that: (1) some students can make excellent use of a second chance in college, which can involve transferring to a different institution, (2) sometimes credits transfer more easily to more selective, private colleges than to less selective, public colleges (even ones within the same university system), and (3) advice and support can be critical to a student’s success, including a transfer student’s success.

The higher education community is fortunate that Ben made his way through the transfer student maze and is now contributing to the success of other college students through his research.

Administrators Should Be Responsible for Information

In my forthcoming book, Pathways to Reform: Credits and Conflict at the City University of New York, as well as in my recent piece in The Evolllution, I write about the many reasons that, despite good evidence for change in higher education, change does not occur.  My new book discusses this topic within the context of facilitating credit transfer between colleges.  The Evolllution piece uses the example of math remediation reform.  Although there has been rigorous evidence supporting math remediation reform, any resulting changes, as well as reforms designed to facilitate credit transfer, have been slow.  Why?

As described in both my new book and the Evolllution piece, the usual explanation given is faculty. I give some of the many reasons that the faculty may be slow to adopt change.  But the faculty aren’t the only reason that change doesn’t get made at colleges and universities.  Again in both publications, I discuss the many reasons that administrators also may not support change.  Further, I make the point that, if there is clear evidence for change, and the faculty will not initiate that change, then it is up to the administrators to effect that change.

But before things reach that point, it is first the responsibility of administrators to make sure that everyone, including the faculty, who would be involved in a change, knows about and understands the evidence supporting the change.  If administrators do not themselves have the expertise or the time to understand and explain the relevant evidence, then the administrators should find one or more people who do.

Throughout my academic career I have been repeatedly appalled at the inadequate transmission of information from the administration to the faculty.  This began when I was a new full professor (and an associate dean) and heard my department chair—incorrectly—tell the department’s faculty that they were teaching more students per faculty member than were any of the other departments.  The department’s faculty were then, understandably, loath to make the dean’s requested changes in the department’s teaching output.

Many years later, when I worked in the CUNY system central office, I learned that one of the 24 CUNY college presidents was allowing only his deans and vice presidents to have access to their college’s performance data (compiled by the CUNY central office), encouraging the faculty to think that their college’s retention and graduation rates were higher than they actually were and discouraging those faculty from believing that any change was necessary.  I subsequently instituted a policy making all of these data publicly available.  Then at least when we discussed what did and did not need changing, everyone was basing their arguments on the same evidence.

A few months ago, I attended a conference whose attendees consisted mostly of administrators.  In one session about remediation, a speaker first asked everyone in the small audience to say where they were from.  Two people sitting together said they were both deans in the Florida public college system.  The speaker then said, how interesting, I’ve been wondering what are the results of the recent remediation changes in Florida (2013 legislation has given students, assessed as needing remediation, the choice as to whether to take traditional remedial courses or not).  The two deans immediately said, oh we don’t know, it’s too soon to have any results yet.  However, despite being in New York, I knew that, in the two years prior to the conference, there had been several publications on the results of the change implemented by the Florida system.  So I raised my hand and told everyone some of the results (the percentage of students passing certain college-level gateway courses has gone down, but because more students were now getting to take those courses, more total students are passing those courses).

I don’t know why the two Florida deans, supposedly interested in and/or involved in remediation or they wouldn’t have attended the session in the first place, did not know about these publications. But what I do know is that if deans working in this area don’t know critical information, then it is likely that their faculty won’t know either, and the deans can’t be helpful in transmitting the information.  In the meantime, the Deans’ faculty may be suffering with lowered pass rates, worrying those lower rates will hurt their reputations as teachers and miserable at having to fail more students.  Any encouragement these faculty might have received from knowing that, nevertheless, more students are being enabled to stay in and graduate from college, is not available.

For all of this I hold administrators responsible.  Good choices depend on having good information, and administrators have both the opportunity and the resources, and thus the responsibility, to obtain and distribute good information to all appropriate personnel.  Only with that information will faculty, administrators, and other staff be able to fulfill their obligations to their institutions and to their students.

Resources on Undergraduate Student Transfer

In connection with my new book, Pathways to Reform:  Credits and Conflict at The City University of New York, I have added many resources to my website concerning transfer.  Suggestions regarding changes in any of these materials are most welcome. My hope is that these resources will provide assistance to all those interested in improving student transfer.

Clicking on my website’s home page top tab titled “New Book…” reveals a drop-down menu listing all of the different resources available.  There you can find:

• General information about the book
• The book’s table of contents
• Supplemental (key documents) and digital (photos, videos, and an audio recording) content associated with specific book chapters
• Information on how to purchase the book
• Comments and reviews about the book
• A list of nonCUNY websites, organizations, key data reports, and best practices concerning student transfer
• A bibliography of articles and books that discuss college student transfer
• A list of publications and broadcasts that refer to transfer at CUNY and, more specifically, CUNY’s Pathways initiative (a set of policies designed to smooth student transfer from one CUNY college to another)
• Examples of uses of the words Path and Pathways, including:
  • Plays on the Words Path and Pathway made during CUNY’s Pathways Project (2011-2013) by CUNY supporters of Pathways, by the PSC (the CUNY Faculty Union), by the UFS (CUNY’s University Faculty Senate), and by outside media
  • Examples of higher education’s use of the words Path and Pathways other than CUNY’s Pathways initiative
  • A few of the many aphorisms and quotations using the words Path or Pathway

Not All Excess Credits Are the Students’ Fault

A recent article in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis reported on an investigation of policies punishing students for graduating with excess credits.  Excess credit hours are the credits that a student obtains in excess of what is required for a degree, and many students graduate having taken several courses more than what was needed.

To the extent that tuition does not cover the cost of instruction, and/or that financial aid is paying for these excess credits, someone other than the student—the college or the government—is paying for these excess credits.  Graduating with excess credits also means that a student is occupying possibly scarce classroom seats longer than s/he needs to and is not entering the work force with a degree and paying more taxes as soon as s/he could.  Thus there are many reasons why colleges and/or governments might seek to decrease excess credits.  The article considers cases in which states have imposed sanctions on students who graduate with excess credits, charging more for credits taken significantly above the number required for a degree.  The article shows that such policies, instead of resulting in students graduating sooner, have instead resulted in greater student debt.  But the article does not identify the reasons why this may be the case.  Perhaps one reason is because students do not have control over those excess credits.

For example, as described in my forthcoming book, Pathways to Reform: Credits and Conflict at The City University of New York, students may accumulate excess credits because of difficulties they have transferring their credits.  When students transfer, there can be significant delays in having the credits that they obtained at their old institution evaluated by their new institution.  At least at CUNY colleges, the evaluation process can take many months.  During that period, a student either has to stop out of college or take a risk and enroll in courses that may or may not be needed for the student’s degree.  Even when appropriate courses are taken, all too often credits that a student took at the old college as satisfying general education (core) requirements or major requirements become elective credits, or do not transfer at all. A student then has to repeat courses or take extra courses in order to satisfy all of the requirements at the new college.  Given that a huge proportion of students now transfer, or try to transfer, their credits (49% of bachelor’s degree recipients have some credits from a community college, and over one-third of students in the US? transfer within six years of starting college), a great number of credits are being lost.

Nevertheless, a 2010 study at CUNY found that a small proportion of the excess credits of its bachelor’s degree recipients was due to transfer—students who never transferred graduated with only one or two fewer excess credits, on average, than did students who did transfer.  Some transfer students may have taken fewer electives at their new colleges in order to have room in their programs to make up nontransferring credits from their old colleges, without adding many excess credits.

But does this mean that we should blame students for those excess credits and make them pay more for them?  Certainly some of the excess credits are due to students changing their majors late and/or to not paying attention to requirements and so taking courses that don’t allow them to finish their degrees, and there may even be some students who would rather keep taking courses than graduate.

But there are still other reasons that students may accumulate extra credits, reasons for which the locus of control is not the student.  Especially in financially strapped institutions, students may have been given bad or no guidance by an advisor.  In addition, students may have been required to take traditional remedial courses, which can result in a student acquiring many of what CUNY calls equated credits, on top of the required college-level credits (despite the fact that there are more effective ways to deliver remediation without the extra credits). Or a student may have taken extra courses that s/he didn’t need to graduate in order to continue to enroll full-time, so that the student could continue to be eligible for some types of financial aid and/or (in the past) health insurance. Students may also have made course-choice errors early in their college careers, when they were unaware of excess-credit tuition policies that would only have an effect years later.

The fact that the imposition of excess-credit tuition policies did not affect the number of excess credits accumulated but instead increased student debt by itself suggests that, to at least some degree, the excess credits are not something that students can easily avoid, and/or that there are counter-incentives operating that are even stronger than the excess tuition.

Before punishing students, or trying to control their behavior, we need to have a good deal of information about all of the different contingencies to which students are subject.  Students should complete their college’s requirements as efficiently as possible.  However, just because some students demonstrate delayed graduation behavior does not mean that they are the ones who are controlling that behavior.  Decreasing excess credits needs to be a more nuanced process, with contingencies and consequences tailored appropriately to those students who are abusing the system, and those who are not.