Community College Remediation

Recently NJ Education Commissioner Hespe wrote an op-ed defending PARCC by stating that “Too many students are graduating high school and heading to college, only to have to take remedial classes to learn materials that they should have already learned. In fact, a full 70 percent of students entering New Jersey's county colleges can't begin their college career unless they pay for remediation classes.”State Sen. Joseph M. Kyrillos penned a very similar op-ed restating the same statistic: “…approximately 70 percent of first-year students at community colleges took remedial courses, costing approximately $70 million per year in non-credit tuition at community colleges.”Unfortunately both Hespe and Kyrillos’ statistics are extremely misleading. The facts about remediation rates are as follows.