Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

While thousands of recent high school graduates enroll in college each year, many are not academically prepared for success in college-level courses. To address this issue, many colleges and universities require first-time enrollees deemed unprepared for college coursework to complete developmental/transitional courses. The Arkansas State Board of Higher Education established guidelines for developmental coursework in 2002, requiring all students scoring below 19 on the English and/or mathematics sections of the ACT to enroll in corresponding developmental courses. The goal of this policy is to assure that incoming students are academically prepared for success in college-level coursework. However, the state of Arkansas, while rural and relatively impoverished, is quite diverse in terms of prosperity by region. Because of this, the goals of education vary by location within the state and is reflected in the student bodies of the individual colleges and universities throughout Arkansas. Therefore, implementation of developmental coursework varies. Certain universities tend to cater to very unique student populations and emphasize different outcomes. With this in mind, our paper examines the implementation of the developmental coursework policy at multiple 2 and 4-year campuses and how it may vary across universities. These variations in student population, implementation, and focus of the universities could explain the differences in student outcomes at each institution.

In this study, we seek to examine the impact Arkansas’s university-level developmental coursework policy has had on students enrolling in developmental courses as measured by academic achievement and attainment as measured by college GPA, success in entry-level courses, and graduation within 6 years of enrollment. Additionally, we examine the impacts of developmental coursework on community college students' completion of a 2-year degree and transferring to a 4-year institution. Our analysis uses student-level data for first-time enrollees at 2 and 4-year public colleges and universities in the state of Arkansas which we have restricted to students just below and just above the cut-off score for recommendation to developmental coursework. The focus of this research is to determine if students in these developmental courses in either subject perform better than their peers who did not enroll in developmental courses. To accomplish this, we employ a regression discontinuity design to analyze the impact of developmental coursework in Arkansas

Initial results from the flagship institution show that students scoring just below the cutoff for developmental math courses are 5 percentage points less likely to persist into the second semester of college. When we widen our sample to include students scoring between 17 and 20 on the ACT math section, we see that students enrolling in developmental math courses are 5 percentage points less likely to graduate in 4 years and 4 percentage points less likely to persist into the second semester of college. We see no statistically significant results when comparing students who scored just below the cutoff in English. When we widen our sample for English, we see students in developmental English courses are 7 percentage points less likely to graduate in 4 years.