Abstract
Florida’s Senate Bill 1720 allowed many students to bypass developmental education and enroll directly in introductory college-level courses. We use an interrupted time series design to introductory college-level courses enrollment and passing rates in English and math for three cohorts of college students prereform and three cohorts postreform. Based on a cohort-by-cohort comparative analysis, we find that cohorts after the reform are more likely to enroll and pass introductory college-level courses in their 1st year of college, indicating that the reform may help to accelerate student success in college. Further, we find that Black and Hispanic students experience even greater gains in passing rates than White students, effectively narrowing the racial/ethnic achievement gap.
Highlights
Florida’s Senate Bill 1720 allowed many students to bypass developmental education and enroll directly in introductory college-level courses
We look at policy impacts from the state of Florida, which implemented an extensive statewide reform that made developmental education (DE) optional for the majority of incoming students at the 28 state colleges in the Florida College System (FCS, the former community college system), and required the colleges to change the instructional modalities for remaining DE courses to allow students to progress more quickly into college credit courses
Β1 captures the change in the course enrollment/passing rate in the postreform period, β2 is a vector of student background characteristics, β3 is a vector of high school academic preparation indicators, ξj is a college fixed effect to account for unobserved heterogeneity across institutions, and λt is a continuous year indicator to account for any underlying temporal trends
Summary
The Impact of Florida’s Developmental Education Reform on Introductory College-Level Course Completion. Florida’s Senate Bill 1720 allowed many students to bypass developmental education and enroll directly in introductory college-level courses. Students are required to pay for these courses but do not receive any college credit They must complete these DE courses before enrolling in the gateway courses that fulfill degree requirements, slowing their academic momentum. In response to these challenges, many states and institutions have begun implementing a variety of different policies to reform their DE programs (e.g., Edgecombe, 2011).
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