Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Two thirds of students who attend community colleges enroll in one or more remedial courses (Chen, 2016). Remedial courses require students to invest time and money that could be applied to college-level coursework, and studies suggest that the effects of remedial courses on student outcomes are at best mixed for students on the cusp of needing additional academic support (Jaggars & Stacey, 2014). Further, students who start college in remediation are less likely to graduate (Attewell, Lavin, Domina, & Levey, 2006).

Most students who participate in remediation in math and/or English are referred to these programs based on scores they earn on standardized placement tests. Research shows that some students assigned to remediation would likely pass a college-level course in the same subject area if given that opportunity; it also suggests that using multiple measures, including high school GPA, may be useful in assessing college readiness (Belfield & Crosta, 2012; Scott-Clayton, 2012). An increasing number of colleges are exploring or beginning to use multiple measures to place incoming students (Rutschow & Mayer, 2018).

To evaluate the impact of a multiple measures placement system on student outcomes, CAPR researchers initiated an experimental study in partnership with the State University of New York (SUNY) system and seven community colleges. The placement system being evaluated uses data on prior students to develop predictive algorithms at each college to weight multiple measures — including placement test scores, high school GPA, years since high school graduation, and in some cases other measures — that are then used to place incoming students into remedial or college-level courses. Over 13,000 incoming students who arrived at these colleges in the fall 2016, spring 2017, and fall 2017 terms were randomly assigned to be placed using either the status quo placement system (the control group) or the alternative placement system (the program group). Students were tracked for up to five terms.

This paper will present final impact analyses for all three cohorts of students. Impact analyses will be conducted using ordinary least squares regression analyses, controlling for college fixed effects and a range of student characteristics. For both math and English, we will consider three outcome measures constructed from administrative data: the rate of college-level course placement (versus remedial course placement), the rate of college-level course enrollment, and the rate of college-level course completion with grade C or higher, all in the same subject area. We will also examine impacts on overall credit accumulation, persistence, and degree completion. To examine whether program assignment led to differential impacts by race/ethnicity, Pell status, or gender, we will present subgroup analyses and tested the significance of interaction effects for each subgroup. Preliminary results which examine first-semester impacts for the first cohort, are broadly positive. We find that program group students were placed differently than they would have been under the status quo placement system and that assignment to the program group produced positive and statistically significant effects on all first-semester outcomes considered, including completion of college-level math and English.