Judah Lindsey's college career started four weeks early and from his bedroom in his parents' house in Pontiac, rather than on the manicured Rochester Hills campus of Oakland University like he'd envisioned.
Lindsey, 19, was one of about 60 incoming freshmen enrolled in the Collectively Oakland Retains Everyone or CORE program in 2020, which starts with a summer bridge program where students brush up on math and writing and continues with at least four semesters' worth of comprehensive academic support.
While Lindsey prepared for his first semester of college, Oakland University was preparing for the unprecedented year ahead and trying to answer a larger question: Would the high school Class of 2020, whose senior year was cut short by the pandemic, be ready for college?
The summer bridge program, with its pre- and post-tests, is part of how Oakland University has tried to answer that question for previous incoming freshmen. Many colleges use placement tests in math and English to determine if students need remedial courses, which traditionally do not count for college credit but come with the same tuition price tag as credit-bearing classes.
"We're really looking to build a strong academic rigor for students who maybe didn't do as well in high school and are going to need that extra support in college," said Omar Brown-El, senior director of Oakland University's Center for Multicultural Initiatives and head of the CORE program.
The year before the pandemic, 23 percent of Michigan's high school Class of 2019 took at least one remedial course when they enrolled in a four-year university or community college. It's too early to know the statewide remedial enrollment rate for the pandemic Classes of 2020 and 2021, but some colleges in Southeast Michigan reported lower remedial enrollment during the pandemic.
Macomb Community College's remedial enrollment rate fell from 32 percent in fall 2019 to 18 percent in fall 2020. Oakland Community College also had a smaller share of incoming students in remedial courses, 16.7 percent in fall 2019 compared to 14.2 percent in fall 2020.
Oakland University enrolled 26 percent of its incoming freshmen in a remedial math course in the fall of 2020, which is up from the fall of 2019 and in line with the university's remedial enrollment rate from previous years.
The enrollment rate for Wayne State University's remedial math course dropped slightly from 7.7 percent of first-time students in the fall of 2019 to 7.2 percent in 2020.
However, the change in remedial enrollment may tell us less about the college readiness of the Class of 2020 and more about the reinvention of remedial education that's currently underway at Michigan colleges. The results of this experiment hold implications for the wave of nontraditional college students — pandemic front-line workers and adults age 25 and older — who will take advantage of Michigan's new free community college tuition programs.
"We're looking to be ready for any type of student as a community college," said Beverly Stanbrough, dean of college readiness at Oakland Community College. "We're continuing to work toward being ready for students, rather than students being ready for college."
Remedial courses aim to help students master the skills they need to succeed in college-level courses — skills they should have learned in high school.
But a growing body of research raises questions about the effectiveness of traditional remedial education and the reliability of placement tests.
Studies suggest remedial education can discourage students from completing their degrees, especially students who are close to the threshold for placement in college-level courses.
Requiring students to take remedial courses as prerequisites to college-level courses adds time and expense to their degrees.
Placing students in remedial courses because they score below a certain cutoff on a standardized placement test contributes to over-enrollment in the lower-level courses, and there's evidence a substantial number of students in remedial courses could have passed college-level courses with a B or better.
"I think the biggest takeaway that one can derive from the research is that it is more helpful to try to support students who do need additional academic and non-academic support at the college level, as opposed to placing them into core prerequisite courses," said Nikki Edgecombe, senior research scholar at Columbia University's Community College Research Center.
This issue is more prevalent at community colleges (where 17.5 percent of incoming students in the Class of 2019 took at least one remedial course) than four-year colleges and universities (where 5.6 percent of incoming students in the Class of 2019 enrolled in a remedial course), according to statewide data from the Center for Educational Performance and Information.
Prior to the pandemic, community colleges and universities in Southeast Michigan were exploring alternative approaches to remedial education, like using multiple measures to predict whether a student is ready for college-level courses instead of a single test score and offering "module" math programs that allow students to practice a specific skill, rather than take a semester-long remedial course that covers some skills they have already mastered.
In addition to its remedial math course, Wayne State University offers an introductory English course, which still counts for college credit; after changing its English placement process going into the 2020-21 academic year, the enrollment rate for introductory English dropped from 19.1 percent in 2019 to 11.9 percent, according to the university.
Since 2012, WSU has offered an alternative admissions program called Academic Pathways to Excellence or APEX for students who show academic promise but do not meet the university's standard admissions requirements.
Similar to Oakland University's CORE program, APEX at WSU offers a summer bridge program for around 130 students each year, plus at least three semesters of comprehensive academic support.
"It's easy to think that we have two groups of students: those who need bridge programs and summer supports, and those who don't need that at all," said Monica Brockmeyer, senior associate provost for student success at Wayne State. "And I think we're seeing the impact (of the pandemic) to be so pervasive that pretty much every student might benefit from a more intensive level of support or more granular supports that are specific to their academic needs."
Innovations in developmental education unfolded quickly during the pandemic, and the state's new Michigan Reconnect Grant that offers free community college tuition to adults age 25 and older will help ensure some of the changes stick by mandating that students spend less time in remedial courses. The Reconnect program has been backed by business groups such as the Detroit Regional Chamber and Small Business Association of Michigan as a way to get workers retrained for in-demand career fields.
Alternative approaches to developmental education often are more labor-intensive for colleges, which is why some institutions have been slower to adapt.
More comprehensive academic support services require additional staff, and faculty may need different credentials to teach corequisite courses, where students simultaneously take a remedial course and an introductory, credit-bearing course.
"The pandemic really kind of pushed the agenda into this more progressive approach to developmental education," said Donald Ritzenhein, provost and vice president for the Learning Unit at Macomb Community College. "We're just now emerging from that experience, and we'll spend the fall trying to determine how well we did. … We don't know how the students did here at Macomb, but what we do know is, based on nationwide studies and other research, they should do very well."
For some students, "enhanced" courses with mandatory tutoring, self-paced modules to develop math skills and summer bridge programs don't feel very different from traditional remedial courses; the students know they need to build up their academic skills in order to be successful in college.
"I'd never heard of something like (APEX) before, and I didn't know if it was like, 'OK, you're in this because you failed,'" said Damon Creighton Jr., who enrolled at Wayne State through its alternative admissions program. "But once I got in and they kind of explained what this all meant and what it all involved, the excitement came right back."
Creighton was diagnosed with epilepsy while attending Wyandotte's Roosevelt High School, and his grades slipped due to his physical and mental health challenges. He always assumed he would go to college, like generations of his family members had, and Wayne State's APEX program ended up being his only option.
Now entering his fifth year at Wayne State, Creighton, 22, credits APEX for giving him the skills to pass his classes and the confidence to complete his degree in social work this spring. He recommended other universities create a math pathway like Wayne State's, which gives students the option to take math workshops in addition to the lectures where they can work closely with instructors and other support staff.
"I did that all the way up to pre-calculus (from remedial beginning algebra). I wasn't super strong in math in high school, and now I tutor for the APEX program and I've been a peer mentor for the summer program since the year after I joined," Creighton said.
For Lindsey, Oakland University's summer bridge program was an invaluable preview of college classes, from the material covered to the workload, expectations, and even the virtual environment due to the pandemic that would continue through his "first freshman year" of college.
After earning mostly As and Bs in his courses last year, which included two remedial math classes, Lindsey is looking forward to his "second freshman year" this fall, when he'll take his first on-campus classes.
"I (was) not accustomed to having to be able to work at a fast pace. … I didn't know college was going to be like that," said Lindsey, who graduated from Pontiac Academy of Excellence after being homeschooled for 10th and 11th grade while his family lived in Africa. "It's so much, but the CORE program is going to prepare you for all that."
Maryam Shah, who enrolled at Wayne State through APEX, said she appreciates the alternative admissions pathway and the opportunity to develop her math skills through a module and work on fundamental writing skills during the summer bridge program.
Shah, 19, said she was "just trying to have fun" her first few years at Harrison High School in Farmington Hills, but then she realized she needed to improve her grades if she wanted to go to college. Her parents, who moved to the U.S. from Pakistan, dreamed of her attending college because they hadn't had the opportunity, and Shah said she realized it was her dream too.
Now Shah is entering her third year at WSU majoring in public health with plans to become a physician assistant, and she is a peer mentor and tutor with APEX. She urged the pandemic high school graduates to believe in themselves and fight through online burnout.
"I know now everything is online, and it's so tiring to get all these emails and text messages. I know they don't want to look at their phones and always respond," she said. "But it is important to just check in and keep up to date, because if you don't, you're more likely to end up not understanding the material and not understanding what's going on."
Brockmeyer, the associate provost at Wayne State, said there is still a lot to learn about how the pandemic has impacted recent high school graduates and current college students.
"This was such a big setback in what students were actually learning, and assessing what students are learning in high school or in college is much more difficult during the crisis," she said. "As students move into their subsequent courses or we see other things emerge during their pathway through college, there'll be a lot more to learn about what they learned."
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