Unprecedented national attention is now focusing on the community college as a critical institution for helping American workers secure economic well-being and for helping the nation as a whole to retain a competitive edge in the world economy. President Obama announced his intention to invest billions of federal dollars to strengthen these schools, with the goal of producing five million more community college graduates by 2020 — which would mean would mean nearly doubling present-day graduation rates at most community colleges.

A major obstacle to realizing these objectives is the fact that many students arrive at community college unprepared to do college-level work and are required to take developmental (remedial) courses — which do not confer credits but for which students must pay tuition — to bring their reading, writing, and mathematics skills up to college-level standards. An analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Educational Longitudinal study shows that only 28 percent of remedial students in two-year colleges attain a degree or certificate within eight and one-half years of entry, compared with 43 percent of nonremedial students. Many students, discouraged by their inability to make adequate progress in their developmental classes, grow discouraged and drop out altogether.

The Developmental Education Initiative (DEI), funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and by Lumina Foundation for Education, seeks to address these problems by supporting the efforts of 15 community colleges to reform developmental education. MDC, Inc., in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is managing the DEI and provides technical support to participating colleges. With funding from Lumina Foundation, MDRC is conducting an evaluation of DEI with the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Lumina Foundation for Education works to ensure that 60 percent of Americans are college-educated by 2025.

The DEI builds on Lumina Foundation’s multiyear national initiative called Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, whose aim is to help students who have faced the greatest barriers to academic success to stay in and complete school. (MDRC is the lead evaluator for Achieving the Dream.) Many of the Achieving the Dream colleges piloted various developmental education reforms on a small scale with promising results.

The colleges participating in DEI have proposed to implement, over a three-year period, developmental education strategies in four areas:

• Modifications to institutional policy and practices to support better outcomes for developmental education students;
• Acceleration of students’ progress through, or avoidance of the need for, developmental education;
• Improved academic and support services for developmental education students; and
• Revised developmental education curricula and teaching methods.