Dear Colleagues,

For decades, millions of college students—including more than half of all those enrolled in community colleges—were barred from taking college courses before passing non-credit-bearing remedial classes in basic reading, writing, and math. A shockingly large share of these students would never make it through remediation, let alone college graduation. These remedial or “developmental” courses saddled students nationally with up to $3 billion a year in tuition for coursework that led them nowhere, dealing a devastating blow to social mobility.
 
In the 2010s, stakeholders responded with one of the most impressive movements in decades to reform American education. State governments, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and philanthropies coalesced around a campaign to tackle the “dev-ed” problem. Successful strategies emerged and many struggling college students began to clear remedial-education hurdles.
 
But the dev-ed movement has largely stalled and vast numbers of students, many of them Black, Latino, and low-income, remain stuck in the quagmire of traditional remedial education.
 
In FutureEd’s latest report, Incomplete: The Unfinished Revolution in College Remedial Education, researched and written by our Senior Fellow Anne Kim, we examine what the dev-ed reform movement has achieved, why it stalled, and what needs to be done to get it back on track as the nation struggles with post-pandemic learning loss.