First-Year Undergraduate Remedial Coursetaking

A new report from NCES looks at what kinds of students take remedial courses, and what kinds of institutions offer remedial courses more often. This Statistics in Brief, First-year Undergraduate Remedial Coursetaking: 1999-2000, 2003-04, and 2007-08, uses data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) to measure the frequency and change of remedial coursetaking in U.S. postsecondary institutions. The results show that remedial coursetaking dropped significantly for nearly every school and student characteristic from 1999-2000 to 2003-04, but rose from 2003-04 to 2007-08 for many of the characteristics that had previously experienced a drop.

Key findings include:

• Overall, the percentage of first-year undergraduate students who reported enrollment in remedial coursework was significantly lower in 2003-04 compared to 1999-2000. However, from 2003-04 to 2007-08, the percentage of students who reported they enrolled in remedial coursework rose by approximately one percentage point. Nonetheless, there was a net drop in the overall percentage of first-year undergraduate students who reported enrollment in remedial courses from 1999-2000 to 2007-08.

• Within each year, lower percentages of White students reported taking remedial courses compared to Black and Hispanic students.

This Statistics in Brief report is a product of the National Center for Education Statistics at the Institute of Education Sciences, part of the U.S. Department of Education.