Two out of every five incoming college freshmen at public four-year universities will wind up in a remedial course, and of those one in three will require remedial math courses, according to a recent New York Times article. At community colleges, the rate of students needing refresher math courses is even greater at three out of every five students.
But recent questions about whether all students need to take algebra have resulted in 11 states setting up task forces to determine the course’s necessity and by extension the necessity of the remedial courses that focus on preparing students for college algebra. Ohio’s public institutions allow students to substitute statistics or quantitative reasoning classes if they don’t plan on pursuing a math or science field rather than subjecting them to remedial courses to prep them for algebra.