Showing posts with label college graduation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label college graduation. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Stats on dev math and college graduation

I've been trying to find out for a while now about longitudinal studies on the graduation rates of students in developmental programs in college. The National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) has published a study which provides the data on that issue as well as many others. In fact you can create your own tables with their Quickstats feature. The study I looked at was the following.
Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS), which follows first-time students beginning their postsecondary education, typically over a period of 6 years. The 1995-96 cohort was followed through 2001.


The data only talks about any remedial course, not math specifically. Nevertheless, one can see from the table that 65% of students who took any developmental course in 1995-1996 did not obtain any degree by 2001. Out of students not taking any developmental courses, 45% did not obtain any degree in that same time period.
So I do wonder if developmental courses in college are helpful only to some limited extent.