Colleges scale corequisite support across an entire institution by changing every step of a student's path into the gateway course, not by adding support sections to an unchanged system. Corequisite support places students directly in a college-level gateway course, with aligned, just-in-time support alongside it, in place of a prerequisite developmental sequence. At US colleges and universities, scale depends on three connected areas. The culture changes, with a cross-functional core team and faculty as partners in the design. The systems change, so that placement, advising, registration, and the class schedule route students into the college-level course by default. And the classroom changes, with a support course designed backward from the college-level outcomes and taught interactively. The measure is throughput, the share of students who complete the gateway course in their first year. Most institutions reach scale within one year.

What corequisite support replaces

Corequisite support at US colleges and universities replaces the prerequisite developmental sequence: one or more courses below the college level that students had to pass before they could take the gateway course. In its place, the student enrolls in the college-level course from the first day, with support alongside it in the same term. The support has one purpose, which is to help the student succeed in that course. A fuller account of what corequisite support is is on its own page.

The old sequence fails students in two ways. Long prerequisite sequences lose students between courses and between terms. And a poor experience in a developmental or gateway math course can lead a student to leave the college, not only the course, because the conclusion many students draw is that if they cannot pass this math class, there is no point staying.

In Almy Education's experience, a poorly implemented corequisite will still often result in more students completing a college-level course than a sequence of well-run developmental courses. That is a reason to replace the sequence, not a reason to settle. The goal is not any corequisite at any quality. Replacing the sequence is where the work starts, and the next section explains why it is not where the work ends.

Why implementation quality, not the model, decides results

Corequisite results at US colleges and universities vary widely, and the variable is rarely the corequisite model itself. The results are in the execution. The same corequisite design can perform very differently at two institutions, and the difference is how consistently the support is used across sections and departments, not the design on paper.

There is a difference between compliance and implementation. Offering a section or two of corequisite support so that the college can say it has corequisites is compliance. Implementation at scale means directing as many students as possible toward corequisite support, because it serves the most students best. Most institutions believe that if corequisites are available, they are at scale. At scale means the vast majority of students start in a college-level course, with or without support.

The other gap opens inside the support time itself. Many corequisites are developmental courses tacked onto a college-level course, or old developmental courses compressed into fewer hours. Where the course is a true support course, the time still has to be used well, and faculty have had very little guidance on how. Left undesigned, the hour drifts into more lecture, homework time, time on the computer, or a recitation, the formats everyone already knows. That is not a failing of faculty; nobody has shown them how to teach this kind of course.

Two situations are common. In the first, corequisites barely exist yet. In the second, they have existed for years but are either not the default way students get support or are the default and not working. Institutions that already offer corequisites without seeing results are the second case, covered in moving from corequisite access to predictable gateway success at scale, and why corequisite results vary at scale is almost always an implementation question. The same holds for tools: the platform or courseware a college chooses matters less than how it designs, schedules, and teaches the support, and a later section covers how to evaluate one.

The Gateway Success at Scale framework for corequisite support

Almy Education's Gateway Success at Scale framework organizes corequisite implementation into three connected areas: culture, systems, and classroom. Culture is the foundation: how faculty, staff, and administrators collaborate and make decisions across silos, which determines whether any change takes root. Systems are the structural layer: placement, advising, scheduling, registration, pathways, and the policies that decide whether students are in the right course at the right time. Classroom is where transformation becomes visible: curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and the corequisite support itself, redesigned with the faculty who teach the courses.

The order matters. Build the foundation first, fix the structure, strengthen the classroom, then sustain the gains through implementation cycles. Institutions often strengthen one area and leave the others unchanged, and that is what creates the implementation gap. The sections that follow take each area in turn.

Culture: one team, one student experience

The culture work in corequisite implementation is how an institution's faculty, staff, and administrators make decisions together about one student experience. Gateway reform touches teaching, advising, registration, and enrollment at the same time, so the decisions are made by a cross-functional team rather than inside one department. Who sits on that team varies by institution.

Faculty co-own the design. Policy can initiate change, but it cannot complete a redesign; faculty decide what to remove from the course as well as what to add, and change moves at the speed of trust. Readiness is the institution's decision, not a feeling: the question shifts from whether the student is ready for the college to whether the college is ready for the student.

Gateway courses sit where student success meets institutional sustainability, so this is retention and completion work, not an instructional initiative alone. The team model and the readiness work are set out step by step in the corequisite implementation field guide.

Systems: pathways, placement, advising, registration, and the class schedule

The systems-level work in corequisite implementation changes the policies and processes that decide which course a student is in before the first class meets.

The right course first: math pathways and corequisites together

Corequisites alone are not enough. Students need the right course for their program, and corequisite support cannot reach its full effect without math pathways. College Algebra is for students who need the algebra-to-calculus track. Students in programs that do not lead to calculus belong in statistics, quantitative reasoning, or liberal arts math, with no prerequisite in front of them. Which course a student is in makes a larger difference than how much support is attached to it. Peer-reviewed research points the same way: Ran and Lin's 2022 study of Tennessee's statewide corequisite reform, published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, attributes most of the gain in gateway math to guiding students into the math course aligned with their program.

Placement, advising, and registration

Placement at scale typically uses high school GPA as the default measure. It is highly predictive of success and stays useful for up to ten years. Deciding on GPA is not the same as operationalizing it: if intake still sends students to the testing center, or the website still says a placement test is required, the change exists in theory only. Advising and registration then present the college-level course, with or without support, as the default option rather than the safe-seeming one.

Support sections have to be easy to find and easy to get into. If a student needs a special advising appointment or a code to enroll, the support is hidden, and a hidden support is not implemented. Course names and course choices can quietly put students off too, with students choosing the course that looks easier on paper over the one that fits their program. These are cross-office changes, which is why the culture work comes first.

Scale shows up in the class schedule

The class schedule is the first diagnostic. If it still carries many standalone developmental sections, corequisite support is not at scale, whatever the policy says. Scale happens in the schedule, not the flowchart. Where a standalone developmental course remains, no more than ten percent of students should be in it. The class schedule also tells students what the college expects of them, so support sections should be visible and plentiful, and scheduled alongside the college-level course rather than on a separate day. How the pairing works in practice belongs on the page about how a corequisite course runs.

Classroom: what leaders should expect from the course

The classroom work in corequisite implementation is what a leader should expect to see in the college-level course and its support, across every section. The design is purpose-driven: it starts from the college-level outcomes, cuts content that does not serve them, and designs the support only after the college-level course is defined, so the support carries only what students need to succeed on those outcomes.

Almy Education structures the support session in five parts: assess, teach, equip, scaffold, and apply. The full plan, with timings and example activities, is in the session structure in the field guide, and how a corequisite course works week to week has its own page. Across sections, the expectation is consistency without identical teaching: common practices, pacing, and expectations, with room for each instructor's style, so that a student's outcome does not depend on which section they land in.

A leader walking past a working corequisite classroom should hear it before seeing it: students talking to each other and working at the board, with the instructor in the mix. A lecture, a homework hour, or an empty room is a sign there is room to grow.

What should colleges consider before adopting a platform or courseware for corequisite support?

Platforms and courseware for corequisite support at US colleges and universities matter less than how a college designs, schedules, and teaches the support: the same corequisite can work at one institution and not at another, and the difference is implementation. The support course is built backward from the college-level course's outcomes. Five questions follow from those two points.

• Does it follow the college-level course week by week, or its own list of topics? Support works when it addresses what the college-level course needs this week, not a list of skills missed in high school.
• Does it keep the session interactive? Support time that drifts into time on the computer loses most of its value; the session should stay mostly students working with each other and the instructor.
• Does it add work that competes with the college-level course? Extra assignments and grading pull students' time away from the course they need to pass.
• Does it give instructors information they will use each week? A quick check of what students are missing, including a review of online homework results, is how a session starts.
• Will it help sections stay consistent? The aim is a shared approach across sections, which a common course shell is one way to support, without fixing how each instructor teaches.

Any platform or courseware chosen should make the suggestions just mentioned feasible to implement and support.

One last point from experience: the materials available for corequisite courses are often weak, which is why Almy Education develops its own worksheets and session structures with the faculty who use them. A tool is worth adopting when it serves a designed course; it is not a substitute for designing one.

How corequisite support differs across math, English, and the sciences

Corequisite support at US colleges and universities looks different in math, English, and the sciences. Discipline-agnostic support does not work for faculty, because the disciplines differ in the content itself and in what makes the college-level course hard.

Math

In math, pathways and corequisite support work together, as the systems section above describes: the right course first, then support built for that course. What the support focuses on depends on the course. In an algebra-based course, the biggest problem is usually students remembering their algebra, so the support rebuilds the algebra the course uses, in the way the course uses it. In a non-algebra course such as statistics or quantitative reasoning, the biggest problem is usually readiness for college-level expectations: using mathematical thinking, getting assignments done, showing up, and following through, so the support focuses on those habits alongside the content. When some students need more than a corequisite can give, institutions have options, from short bootcamps and software-based skill work to one well-designed standalone course, and each carries trade-offs the college weighs for itself. The field guide's examples come from math, and it is the place to start planning.

English

In English, the same five-part structure fits. The support session still assesses, teaches, equips, scaffolds, and applies; it just looks different, because students are making sense of a text or writing something rather than solving a problem. Reading and writing are integrated. Developmental reading support is embedded in the composition course, in the context where the reading is used, the same way pre-algebra skills are embedded in a college math course, instead of living in a standalone reading course that never accomplished what it was meant to. The common failure is the same as in math: the support time settles into a rut, often conferences to review papers and little else, and stops meeting students' varied needs, including the non-cognitive ones, which need attention every week of the term and not only at the start. At Piedmont Technical College, gateway English completion rose from 51 to 76 percent after standalone developmental courses were replaced with corequisite support that met students' variety of learning needs.

The sciences: biology, anatomy and physiology, and chemistry

Support for the sciences is not the math and English approaches with the names changed. In biology, anatomy and physiology, and chemistry, students usually already have access to the college-level course; there is rarely a prerequisite sequence to dismantle or a high-stakes placement test to remove. What students struggle with is getting through content that is hard in and of itself. So the work is mostly at the classroom level: instituting structure before, during, and after class, so students have assignments and accountability rather than advice; consistency across sections, so outcomes do not swing with the instructor or the term, without touching academic freedom; and departments deciding together on content, coverage, and assessment. Those conversations are newer in the sciences, where many faculty are specialists and may be the only person in the department with their specialty.

Corequisite support fits where a prerequisite blocks access, most often math before chemistry. Instead of an intermediate algebra prerequisite, a focused math-for-chemistry corequisite teaches, or reteaches, the math in the way chemistry uses it, which serves the chemistry faculty and the students, and saves everyone time. The stakes differ from math and English in one more way: students who fail majors biology or chemistry more often change programs than leave the college. Almy Education's science work is at this classroom level, including 20 colleges in Ohio implementing biology, chemistry, and anatomy and physiology corequisites with Complete College America and the Ohio Department of Higher Education, and 4 colleges in South Carolina implementing biology and chemistry corequisites.

Implementing corequisite support at scale: timeline and iteration

Implementing corequisite support at scale at a US college or university is a cycle of evaluation, strategy, and implementation, repeated term to term. With Almy Education's Gateway Success at Scale approach, most institutions reach scale within one year, and the first measurable improvement in gateway completion comes in 12 to 18 months.

A year is enough to operationalize the system changes. Rowan College at Burlington County spent one fall term talking with every program area to settle which math course each program requires, spent the winter and spring terms getting the courses approved and built into the catalog and the student information system, trained advisors and faculty on the new placement and advising, and rolled out at scale the following fall term. A year from now, a leader should be able to say what launches in the fall and who is being trained for it; if the answer is vague, the plan is.

Iteration is part of the design, not a sign the model is failing. The first term of a redesigned course produces the data for the second, and the cycle continues. Many institutions that offer corequisites without seeing results are stuck because the iteration phase never happened: the course launched and was never revisited. The other way to stall is a pilot that never becomes the default, staying optional, limited to a few sections, or dependent on a few champions. The redesign is at scale when it is simply how the college operates.

Measuring corequisite success: throughput and the metrics that matter

Corequisite success at US colleges and universities is measured first by throughput: the percentage of students who complete their first college-level gateway course within the first year. Pass rates matter, but throughput reflects the whole student experience, across placement, advising, enrollment, course design, and support, which is why it is the North Star for gateway redesign.

At scale, success is the norm rather than the exception. Pass rates in the corequisite-supported gateway course settle at roughly 70 to 80 percent in English and 60 to 80 percent in math, depending on the institution and the course. If fewer than half of students complete the gateway course in their first year, there is a lot more that can be done. Outcomes are disaggregated by race, income, and age, so that improvements reach the students the sequence was failing.

The earliest signals come before the term ends. Fill patterns before the term starts show whether students are being directed into corequisite sections and whether they can get into them. A quick check with students around the fourth week asks whether the support is meeting their needs while there is still time to adjust, and short anonymous surveys of students and of faculty and staff catch problems early. People will usually say when something is not working. The research behind these measures is collected on the page on what the research shows.

What results look like

Results from corequisite support at scale show up first in gateway completion, and three of Almy Education's partner institutions show what that looks like. At Piedmont Technical College, gateway math completion rose from 52 to 74 percent and English from 51 to 76 percent across the fall terms from 2021 to 2025, after the college replaced standalone developmental courses with corequisite support. At Black Hawk College, the first stage of the corequisite work combined placement reform, simplified registration, and a corequisite College Algebra pilot, and success rates in the pilot rose. At Manchester University, more students went straight into college-level statistics after placement moved from a test to high school GPA, and the pass rate held at 78 percent.

Almy Education has partnered with over 100 college and university clients on this work, including seven state-level gateway redesign partnerships, and brings that practice to every corequisite support implementation.

Frequently asked questions

How do colleges scale corequisite support across an entire institution?

By changing culture, systems, and the classroom together, not by adding sections. A cross-functional team with faculty as partners makes the decisions; placement, advising, registration, and the class schedule route students into the college-level course by default; and the support course is designed backward from the college-level outcomes and taught interactively. Progress is measured by throughput, the share of students who complete the gateway course in their first year.

Why do some corequisite models get better results than others?

Because results come from implementation, not from the model. The questions that separate strong results from weak ones are whether the support is the default way students get help, whether students can find and enroll in it easily, and whether the support time is designed and taught as a bridge into the college-level course rather than drifting into lecture, homework time, or computer time.

How long does it take to implement corequisite support at scale?

Most institutions reach scale within one year, with the system changes operationalized across one academic year and the redesigned courses launching the following fall. The first measurable improvement in gateway completion comes in 12 to 18 months, and iteration continues term to term after that.

How does corequisite support differ in English and the sciences?

In English, the same five-part support session structure applies to making sense of texts and writing, with reading and writing integrated and developmental reading support embedded in the composition course. In the sciences, students usually already have access to the college-level course, so most of the work is classroom-level course design and consistency, with corequisite support where a prerequisite blocks access, mainly math before chemistry.

What should colleges consider before adopting corequisite math platforms or courseware?

The tool matters less than how the support is designed, scheduled, and taught, and the support course is built backward from the college-level course's outcomes. Against that course, a tool should follow the college-level course week by week, keep the session interactive rather than turning it into computer time, add no work that competes with the college-level course, give instructors a quick weekly read on what students are missing, and help sections stay consistent.

How do you measure whether corequisite support is working?

Throughput first: the percentage of students completing the gateway course in their first year. Then pass rates in the supported course, outcomes disaggregated by race, income, and age, and the early signals that arrive before the term ends, such as fill patterns, a check with students around week four, and short anonymous surveys of students, faculty, and staff.

What should a provost check first if corequisites are not working?

The class schedule. Count the standalone developmental sections still being offered, and check whether support sections are easy to find and easy to enroll in without a special appointment or code. If the class schedule looks right, ask students whether the support is worth their time, and walk past a few sessions: a working corequisite classroom is active and full of students talking, and a lecture or a homework hour is a sign of room to grow.