Book Description

A primary goal of the U.S. Department of Education's Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Blueprint for Reform is to improve the college readiness of high school graduates (U.S. Department of Education 2010). College readiness is a complex benchmark and has been measured in several ways, including transcript analysis (Adelman 2006) and standardized test scores (ACT 2005). One such measure, and the focus of this Statistics in Brief, is remedial coursework enrollment. Consistent with earlier NCES publications, this brief defines remedial courses as courses for students lacking skills necessary to perform college-level work at the degree of rigor required by the institution (Parsad and Lewis 2003). At the start of their college careers, students who are not sufficiently prepared to complete entry-level courses are often encouraged or required to take developmental or remedial courses. Results from previous surveys conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) that collected data on the percentage of students enrolled in remedial coursework found that 28 percent of first-year students who entered 2- or 4-year degree-granting postsecondary institutions were enrolled in remedial courses in both 1995 and 2000 (Parsad and Lewis 2003). Given evidence of stable remediation rates during the late-1990s, and the current education reform context that seeks to reduce remediation in college, this Statistics in Brief provides descriptive data on the frequency of self-reported enrollment in remedial courses within and across three time points, 1999-2000, 2003-04, and 2007-08. The purpose of the brief is to update the available evidence regarding self-reported student remediation and provide descriptive information as context for policy discussions. This Statistics in Brief uses data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) to examine the incidence of remedial coursetaking between the 1999-2000, 2003-04, and 2007-08 academic years. Specifically, this brief examines the percentages of first-year undergraduate students enrolled in institutions of higher education (IHE) who reported taking remedial courses in the 1999-2000, 2003-04, and 2007-08 academic years, by institutional characteristics, such as institutional control (public or private), level (2-year or 4-year) and selectivity. For students who attended public institutions, the brief examines enrollment characteristics, such as undergraduate degree program and field of study; and student characteristics, such as sex, race/ethnicity, age, parents' education, and dependency status. NPSAS is a nationally representative survey of all postsecondary students enrolled in Title IV institutions. Standard Error Tables are appended. (Contains 6 tables, 1 figure and 10 footnotes.).