Bill Caption

Fiscal Notes

Bill Analysis

Under this bill, each institution of higher education shall develop and implement, for developmental education, a corequisite model under which a student concurrently enrolls in a developmental education course and a freshman-level course in the same subject area for each subject area for which the student is referred to developmental coursework. If the student fails, the university will offer to the student a range of competency-based education programs to assist the student in becoming ready to perform freshman-level academic coursework in the applicable subject area.

Allowable appropriations for a general academic institution's developmental education program would be reduced from 18 to 9 hours and down from 27 to 18 hours for public junior colleges, public technical institutes, or public state colleges. Exceptions exist if the development course in English for a speaker of another language. 

Vote Recommendation Notes

Under the current system, higher education institutions enroll students who are not college-ready in developmental education programs with the goal of getting them ready for college level coursework. Unfortunately, students and their families spend incredible amounts of money on these developmental courses only to see very few results. One data point that resonated with us is that only 9% of students who take developmental courses ever go on to earn college credit. We support reforming this system to prevent the continued unfruitful path of guiding people into developmental courses that never seem to develop them into college-ready students. 

Because this bill moves in the right direction of accountability for public institutions of higher education, puts students on a path to actually earning college credit without wasting their money, and lowers the cap on the number of hours the legislature may fund for developmental education, we support this bill as an affirmation of limited government and individual liberty.