What Happens to Efficiency and Equity? The Cost Implications of Developmental Education Reform

Christine G. Mokher (), Toby J. Park-Gaghan and Shouping Hu
Additional contact information
Christine G. Mokher: Florida State University
Toby J. Park-Gaghan: Florida State University
Shouping Hu: Florida State University

Research in Higher Education, 2021, vol. 62, issue 2, No 2, 174 pages

Abstract: Abstract Florida passed legislation in 2013 that exempted many students from developmental education, and required colleges to implement new instructional modalities for optional developmental education courses. This paper uses an economic model of remediation to examine how changes in college course taking before and after the reform altered costs to completing introductory college-level courses in math and English for students and institutions, and whether cost savings differ by racial/ethnic subgroup. We also take into account changes in short-term costs relative to course completion rates to examine whether the reform is cost effective overall. We find that the total cost per completer (including costs to both students and institutions) decreased after the reform by $894 in English and $1851 in math. This resulted in efficiency gains of 34% in English and 30% in math. The results from Florida provide promising evidence that statewide developmental education reforms may be an effective mechanism for reducing costs to students and institutions. Reform efforts may also help to reduce racial/ethnic gaps in the costs to gateway completion in both subject areas, which has important implications for equity.

Keywords: Educational economics; Cost effectiveness; Developmental education; Community colleges; State policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11162-020-09593-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:reihed:v:62:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11162-020-09593-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11162

DOI: 10.1007/s11162-020-09593-w

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Higher Education is currently edited by Robert K. Toutkoushian

More articles in Research in Higher Education from Springer, Association for Institutional Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().