Virginia math reform expanded access, but one-third never enrolled

A new September 2026 Virginia working paper lands on an uncomfortable conclusion for colleges that have embraced corequisite math reform: giving students permission to skip standalone remediation did not guarantee that they actually got into, or through, college-level math. In the study, which examined a statewide Virginia policy shift at the state’s largest community college, about one-third of students never enrolled in the math course sequence they were cleared or advised to take. The result was a split picture: students with weaker preparation generally benefited from corequisite placement compared with prerequisite remediation, while somewhat better-prepared students were less likely to enroll in math when their new option was a gateway course paired with extra support rather than a standalone gateway class. (edworkingpapers.com)

That finding matters because Virginia’s reform was built on a widely shared theory of action. In 2019, the Virginia Community College System said it wanted to move away from heavy reliance on placement testing and developmental sequences that delayed credit-bearing coursework. A 2020 article in Inquiry: The Journal of the Virginia Community Colleges—a peer-reviewed VCCS journal—described the coming Direct Enrollment Pilot as a model that would place students “at the margins of college preparation” directly into college coursework with supplemental support. The new paper suggests the policy’s weak point was not the idea of faster access itself, but the handoff between placement, advising, registration, and course completion. (vccs.edu)

The study, by XunFei Li, Florence Xiaotao Ran, Daman Chhikara, Zachary M. Beamer, and Di Xu, combines regression discontinuity analysis with interviews of students, advisors, and instructors. That design gives the paper more bite than a simple descriptive report, but readers should still keep its limits in view: it is a September 2026 EdWorkingPaper, not yet peer reviewed, and it focuses on one college inside a broader statewide reform. So this is not the final statewide verdict on Virginia corequisites. It is, however, a strong warning that implementation can overwhelm policy intent. (edworkingpapers.com)

Access is not the same as enrollment

The paper’s most useful contribution may be its insistence on separating access from take-up. Higher ed debates often treat those as if they are the same event: once a student is allowed into gateway math, the reform has “worked.” But the Virginia findings show a sizable gap between institutional permission and student action. Interview evidence pointed to registration and scheduling problems, added credit and financial burden, confusion about math pathways, and weak advisor communication. In other words, the reform did not fail only in the classroom. It also frayed in the registrar’s office, in advising conversations, and in the practical question of whether a student could build a workable schedule around the new model. (edworkingpapers.com)

Official VCCS course listings help explain why that gap could be so large. The common support courses attached to Virginia’s direct-enrollment math pathways—MDE 54 for quantitative reasoning, MDE 55 for statistical reasoning, and MDE 61 for precalculus—are each three credits. They are paired with three-credit gateway courses such as MTH 154, MTH 155, and MTH 161. On paper, that looks like support. In practice, for a student, it can look like doubling the time commitment for math in a semester already constrained by work, caregiving, transportation, or aid limits. That is an inference from the course structure, but it fits the paper’s interview findings about cost, scheduling, and registration friction. (courses.vccs.edu)

That distinction matters for campus leaders. A placement reform can be centrally designed and celebrated as an equity move, yet still leave students to navigate a six-credit math package through ordinary self-service registration. If one-third of eligible students never enroll in the recommended sequence, the bottleneck is no longer chiefly curricular. It is operational. Colleges that want the reform’s promised gains may need to treat corequisite math less as a menu option and more as a coordinated pathway that is automatically bundled, clearly explained, and easy to register for in one step. That last point is analysis rather than a direct claim from the paper, but it follows closely from the study’s documented barriers. (edworkingpapers.com)

Different students, different effects

The paper is equally valuable for showing that “corequisites work” is too blunt a summary. For less-prepared students, placement into a gateway course with corequisite support raised both gateway math enrollment and completion relative to prerequisite remediation, though the completion gains were smaller than the enrollment gains. That pattern suggests a real access benefit: more students reached college-level math, but not all of the newly enrolled students finished successfully. For more-prepared students, the opposite enrollment pattern appeared. When the comparison was standalone gateway math, being steered into a supported corequisite route reduced math enrollment substantially, with no detectable overall effect on completion. (edworkingpapers.com)

That split has a concrete institutional meaning. Students who would otherwise face a noncredit remedial sequence may see corequisites as a better route because the alternative is slower and more punitive. Students closer to college-ready, by contrast, may experience the support course as an extra hurdle attached to a class they believe they should simply be allowed to take. If that reading is right—and the paper’s interview evidence makes it plausible—then a single reform can help one group by reducing delay while discouraging another by increasing hassle. The implementation lesson is not that colleges should retreat to old remedial pipelines. It is that colleges need sharper rules about who truly needs the added support, plus clearer messaging about why the support exists and how it connects to a student’s program math pathway. (edworkingpapers.com)

A complication, not a reversal

Colleges should also resist overreading the paper as a broad rejection of corequisite remediation. Earlier systemwide evidence from Tennessee, summarized by the Community College Research Center, found that corequisite remediation improved gateway-course outcomes compared with prerequisite remediation. A newer 2024 working paper examining Tennessee data across placement-score bands likewise reported positive gateway and subsequent math effects for students below the college-level threshold. The Virginia paper does not erase that body of evidence. Instead, it reframes the question. Corequisites may still be academically stronger than traditional remediation, but their advantages can shrink or disappear when colleges make the supported course sequence hard to understand, hard to schedule, or hard to pay for. (ccrc.tc.columbia.edu)

That is a more useful frame for practitioners than the familiar yes-or-no debate over whether corequisites “work.” The paper points college leaders toward the unglamorous mechanics that often decide whether a reform survives contact with students: advising scripts that explain the pathway plainly; registration systems that link the gateway and support course cleanly; schedules that do not force students into awkward combinations across campuses or times of day; and program maps that make clear whether a student should be in quantitative reasoning, statistics, or precalculus. None of that is as ideologically satisfying as arguing for or against remediation, but it is where student progression is actually won or lost. (edworkingpapers.com)

For community colleges, the practical message is stark. A placement reform can expand formal access and still leave students stranded one click, one advising conversation, or one extra three-credit support course away from the finish line. The next thing to watch is not simply whether more systems adopt corequisite math. It is whether they redesign the surrounding machinery so that the reformed option is the easiest path for students to follow, not just the one colleges say is available. (edworkingpapers.com)