About 30 percent of Colorado high school graduates who enroll in a public state college aren’t ready for college-level work and must take basic courses in math, writing or reading, a report released Tuesday says.
The Colorado Commission on Higher Education report, one of the most comprehensive studies of state remediation rates, says the percentage of students who have to take sub-college-level classes as college freshmen is higher than 60 percent for some school districts.
And even at some of the districts with the most success – Cherry Creek, Doug las County and Boulder Valley – 20 percent to 25 percent of students who graduate and go to college have to take at least one remedial course.
“Just because your kid goes to a suburban high school and is on the college track doesn’t mean they won’t need remediation,” said Rick O’Don nell, state higher-education commissioner.
The percentage of students requiring remedial classes increased from 25 percent in 2002 to about 30 percent in 2004, the commission said.
Students placed in remedial courses in college are behind from the start.
Some spend their first semester or even their entire freshman year catching up on basics they should have learned in high school, delaying college graduation. They also have to pay for the classes, which don’t count toward an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.
About 75 percent of students who do not have to take a remedial class earn a bachelor’s degree within five years, O’Donnell said. Conversely, 75 percent of students placed in a remedial class don’t make it to graduation within five years, he said.
The study included only traditional college students, not adults who enrolled in college years after high school. And it reflects only those high school graduates who went to college, which is about 31 percent of high school graduates in Colorado, according to the Education Commission of the States. It excludes students who went to private universities or private high schools.
More students are required to take remedial math than any other basic-skills course, according to the study.
Colorado lags behind the national average in preparing students for college, the commission said, though it offered no statistics because there is not a comparable national study.
However, David Longanecker, director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, said Colorado’s 30 percent rate is not “out of the ballpark” compared with national rates.
“There’s a lot of angst about this all around the country,” Longanecker said.
In many states, there is a debate about whether the K-12 system or higher education should pay for remedial classes, he said.
The state spent $10.5 million on remedial education in fiscal year 2003-04.
Several experts said a big part of the reason for high remediation rates is that Colorado has no statewide high school graduation requirements, leaving it up to local districts to decide how many years of math, English or science a student has to take.
The commission’s chief academic officer, Matt Gianneschi, hates what he calls “the wasted senior year,” when some students take an easy load of study halls and electives.
Danielle Martinez, 19, took basic reading and a study-skills class at the Community College of Denver this fall after dropping out of school in seventh grade and getting her GED this year.
“It refreshed my memory on how to do some stuff,” she said.
Ashley Russell, a CCD freshman who spent her first semester brushing up on math and reading, said she wasn’t thrilled when she found out she had to take remedial classes. But, she said, it pushes back graduation only by a semester.
“I wasn’t too happy about it, but I didn’t really have a choice,” she said.
Colleges decide whether students need basic-skills courses using national college-entrance exams, the ACT and SAT, and placement exams given on campus.
“If you cannot read at college level, you’re not going to understand what you read in biology or in a chemistry textbook,” CCD president Christine John son said.
The key to improving remediation rates in college is “the redesign and significant reform of high schools,” Johnson said.
About 40 percent of CCD students had to take at least one basic-skills course in 2004, the commission’s study said. Percentages at the rest of the state’s 13 community colleges range from 12 percent to 68 percent.
At the University of Colorado at Boulder, just 1.1 percent of students have to take a remedial course, and it’s less than 1 percent at CU-Colorado Springs, the study says.
Adams State College in Alamosa, where 53 percent of students needed a remedial course in 2004, draws many first-generation college students from tiny high schools.
“You might have a rural high school on the Eastern Plains where they may not have had chemistry or advanced biology,” said Barbara Medina, chairwoman of the teacher-education department at Adams State. “We’ve passed the buck from the family system to the K-12 system to the college system.”
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
