The Trouble in Tucson

Abstract

Crushed by reduced public funding in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, many four-year colleges, universities, and entire states—Colorado, Louisiana, Nevada, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and South Carolina, for example— elected to remand all developmental education activities to community colleges, citing escalating costs and productivity goals as reasons for no longer offering pre-collegiate coursework in those settings. Some community colleges, for the very same reasons, effectively instituted a floor to their college-bound developmental coursework and are referring students who test below an admissions standard to adult education and literacy (AEL) and/or other more promising programs on campus or in the community. Pima Community College (PCC) in Tucson, Arizona, serves as the nation’s most well-known and recent example of an institution adopting an admissions requirement to the Federal Student Aid (FSA)-eligible developmental education curriculum. Other community colleges to institute admissions standards have done so quietly, ostensibly to avoid the intense backlash Pima administrators and the board endured after they chose to communicate openly and frequently with their community leading up to the seventh-grade admissions requirement and to advertise the policy change to the world of higher education.