Postsecondary remediation is a controversial topic. On one hand, it fills an important and sizeable niche in higher education. On the other hand, critics argue that it wastes tax dollars, diminishes academic standards, and demoralizes faculty. Yet, despite the ongoing debate, few comprehensive, large-scale, multi-institutional evaluations of remedial programs have been published in recent memory. The study presented here constitutes a step forward in rectifying this deficit in the literature, with particular attention to testing the efficacy of remedial math programs. In this study, I use hierarchical multinomial logistic regression to analyze data that address a population of 85,894 freshmen, enrolled in 107 community colleges, for the purpose of comparing the long-term academic outcomes of students who remediate successfully (achieve college-level math skill) with those of students who achieve college-level math skill without remedial assistance. I find that these two groups of students experience comparable outcomes, which indicates that remedial math programs are highly effective at resolving skill deficiencies.

Burton Clark's proposition concerning the cooling out of underprepared students in community colleges has a controversial history and remains a point of contention. Central to Clark's description of the cooling out process is the academic counselor, whose job it is to dissuade underprepared students from goals perceived to be overambitious and ease these students into lesser, presumably better-fitting academic trajectories. In this study, I test a number of hypotheses concerning the effect of advising on students' chances of attaining their goals. I seek to determine what effect advising has on students' attainment, and whether this effect is dependent upon students' academic preparation, students' race/ethnicity, the racial/ethnic composition of the college, or the representation of underprepared students in the college. I use hierarchical discrete-time event history analysis to analyze data that address two subsets of the Fall 1995 cohort of first-time freshmen who enrolled in any of California's 107 semester-based community colleges. I find that advising is actively beneficial to students' chances of success, and all the more so for students who face academic deficiencies, which contradicts deductions drawn from Clark's description of the active role of counselors in the cooling out process.

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