Developmental education

Students enter college with incredible motivation to reach their educational and career aspirations. Traditional developmental education policies and practices place about half of students attending two-year colleges and a third of students attending four-year colleges in precollege, non-credit English and math courses. These policies and practices, while well intended, grossly underestimated students’ abilities, stranding them in non-credit remedial courses while sapping their financial aid, resulting in dropout rates as high as 80%.

The good news? Efforts to redesign developmental education are gaining traction—and achieving significant results for students.

Hitting Their Stride: Moving the Developmental Education Reform Movement from Policy to Practice.

This analysis conducted by Tyton Partners for Strong Start to Finish summarizes the state of developmental redesign efforts on campuses across the country and offers insights about factors that are helping and holding back institutions as they move from adopting new policies to implementing them. The report also notes common themes driving implementation success. 
Read the Report


Investment Priorities

Our grantmaking in this area focuses on taking redesign to scale, equipping partners to work with a growing number of campuses, systems, and states as they launch and sustain their redesign efforts.
Expanding knowledge on developmental education redesign across the postsecondary sector
Expand knowledge base about effective developmental education redesign, particularly in narrowing or eliminating disparities in outcomes by race, ethnicity, and income.
Supporting scaling efforts of exemplar programs and practices
Support scaling efforts, in both policy and practice.