Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

California Community Colleges (CCC), the largest public higher education system in the country, are a vital part of the postsecondary education system in the state and the country. They serve over half of the states’ Latinos and African Americans and provide access to many low-income and non-traditional students. Nevertheless, in California and across the country, one of the major impediments to student success is the large number of entering students who are deemed underprepared for college-level work. Across the CCC system, 80 percent of students are designated as needing developmental (or remedial) education in reading, writing, and/or math. What is more, this group of students are less likely to meet their academic goals.

Concerns about the poor track record of traditional developmental course sequences and the growing interest in improving student success, have led colleges and states across the country, including California, to implement co-requisite remediation—an approach which enrolls students referred to developmental reading, writing, and math directly in a college-level course alongside an academic support course. This structure eliminates multiple opportunities for students to exit the sequence and allows students to avoid developmental requirements, propelling students directly into college-level coursework. While co-requisites are a relatively new reform, the early evidence suggest they are leading to dramatic gains in completion of transfer-level math and English courses.

While the evidence is encouraging, more work is needed to examine whether all students benefit equally from co-requisite courses. Given that students historically underserved in higher education are projected to drive increases in college enrollments in California, it is critical to determine if positive impacts of co-requisites hold for diverse student groups. This study aims to fill this gap. The purpose of this research is to use longitudinal student-level data from the California Community College system to determine whether and to what extent co-requisite courses in English improve outcomes for diverse groups of CCC students. The size, diversity, and structure of the CCC system provides us with important methodological opportunities. The system enrolls 2.1 million students and is somewhat decentralized with 114 colleges across the state in 72 districts.

Specifically, we conduct a difference-in-difference (DID) analysis to determine whether and to what extent co-requisite courses in English improve student outcomes and help close achievement gaps for low-income and underrepresented groups. This method exploits variation in the use of co-requisite courses across colleges and over time to identify the impact. Our preliminary descriptive findings suggest that this approach has resulted in the most impressive gains yet of any developmental education reform. Additionally, colleges also experienced improvements in equity, but gaps remained. While preliminary, these findings suggest that colleges will need to be more intentional about equity as they move forward with implementing and scaling co-requisites. This is especially key as an increasing number of CCC’s implement co-requisites as one way to comply with Assembly Bill (705)—which mandates that colleges use placement policies that maximize the likelihood that students complete transfer-level math and English within one-year.