Businesses Have Remedies for Sale, but a Cure Is Not Guaranteed

Companies have had mixed results in the sale of remedial education

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By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK

From a numbers perspective, companies like Sylvan Learning Systems and Kaplan Inc. certainly looked like they were onto something in the late 1990s when they began venturing into the business of providing remedial education on college campuses.

After all, with more than 40 percent of all entering college students needing to take at least one remedial course in mathematics, reading, or writing, the market for a business that would smooth the transition from high school to college by designing or actually teaching remedial courses seemed vast.

Neither company's ventures lasted more than a few years.

Kaplan, which designed and oversaw remedial-education programs, declined to discuss its now-defunct operation. A former executive of what was then Sylvan says the company's service, in which Sylvan employees would teach on campuses, seemed to be well received by colleges, but the cost of selling it "wore us down," and, like Kaplan, Sylvan eventually gave up.

"It was an OK piece of business, but it just didn't grow at the rate we wanted it to," recalls Steven Pines, who ran the Sylvan at College program and is now executive director of the Education Industry Association, a trade group based in Washington. Colleges would take 12 to 18 months deciding whether to hire the company, and sometimes the decisions seemed politicized because of opposition from faculty members who disliked the idea of outsourcing teaching duties, says Mr. Pines. At some campuses, "they committeed us to death."

Those millions of entering students requiring remedial education are still a lure for businesses. Now, however, rather than face-to-face instruction, publishers and other companies are increasingly promoting products and services built around the Internet, like the interactive software program MyMathLab, sold by Pearson Education Inc. imprints, and online tutoring offered by Smarthinking Inc.

But market observers, and the companies themselves, say the business challenges remain confoundingly the same.

Few of the companies have taken off, and many say they are penetrating the higher-education market at a much slower pace than they expected. "It's tough sledding," says Jeffrey E. Butler, chairman and chief executive of American Education Corporation, an Oklahoma City company that made its name in the elementary-and-secondary-school market and recently began selling a college-level course, Advancer Online, that is meant to help students pass the placement tests that entering freshmen take.

Indeed, one of the big names in the interactive-software market, the publicly traded PLATO Learning, has reported losses for the last several years and recently underwent a major restructuring. The company, which also sells products aimed at the general-education market, would not say how well its remedial business, in particular, is doing. PLATO is the company that came to own the products developed by Academic Systems, itself a once-promising company whose remedial-mathematics software programs never sold as robustly as company investors had hoped.

"The remedial play has been very difficult" for companies trying to sell to colleges, says Adam J. Newman, a vice president at Eduventures Inc., a consulting company for the education industry.

The reasons for that are complex — nearly as complex as the problems of remedial education itself.

For one, most colleges do not want to spend a lot of money on remedial education. "Not nearly enough of them have assigned it the priority that it requires," say Byron N. McClenney, a longtime community-college president who now coaches colleges on remedial-education strategies. He is project director at the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin. That low priority is underscored by the fact that nationally about two-thirds of all remedial courses are taught by adjunct faculty members. And even at community colleges, where remedial or "developmental" courses are an explicit part of the institutional mission, the instructors assigned to teach such courses are often juggling heavy teaching loads.

Another issue, say educators, is that the quality of the products is uneven, and even the most sophisticated are not solutions in themselves.

In mathematics, MyMathLab and Academic Systems Interactive Math appear to be the dominant programs in the college market. A newer product, ALEKS, developed by cognitive scientists from the University of California at Irvine, who formed a company with the same name to sell it, is also beginning to gain traction.

In reading and in writing, the market is far more fragmented, experts say, although several of them mentioned Communciations Fitness, PassKey, and Reading Plus as some leading products.

"Some of the products are as good as they can be," says Hunter R. Boylan, an authority on remedial education and director of Appalachian State University's National Center on Developmental Education. However, he says, "No business or publisher has come up with a product yet that works as consistently as well as face-to-face instruction" from a well-trained teacher.

In combination, factors like a reluctance to spend money and the uneven quality of products create a recipe for failure.

Colleges with large numbers of underprepared students often feel overwhelmed, says Mr. Boylan. With few other options, they "feel pushed to sort of batch-process" their students into remedial programs that rely heavily on computer-based software and overwhelmed or undertrained instructors.

"There are places that say: There are the computers, go to it," says Mr. Boylan.

Not surprisingly, he adds, the results are often "huge and indefensible attrition rates."

Nicholas Bekas, a remedial-education instructor at Orlando's Valencia Community College and a participant in one of several efforts nationwide designed to improve developmental education, says the problem lies both with the products and the colleges.

Too many of the publishers' products, he says, seem "developed on the cheap" and don't offer students much more than a jazzed-up version of a textbook. At his college, he notes, professors tested a host of products in English for five years and finally decided none of them were any better than what they could produce themselves.

Other products do offer more sophisticated pedagogy, providing interactive feedback or a sequence of exercises that get harder and harder as students progress. But even then, says Mr. Bekas, too many instructors do not take proper advantage of them.

"Teachers still don't really know how to use technology correctly," he says. They are not making it "an organic part of the class."

Industry experts say it is that resistance to change in teaching styles — either because the instructors have not been given the training to change, or because they are unwilling or too threatened to change — that keeps some students from getting the full benefit of products that do show promise.

"There's a little bit of 'not invented here,'" says Mr. Butler, of American Education. "There's a little bit of, Gee, is this going to take my job away?"

But even some of the most ardent critics say they see hopeful signs of change. With the nation's growing attention to developmental education, says Mr. Boylan, director of the center at Appalachian State, there is a new push on many campuses to provide better training to adjunct instructors who teach remedial courses.

More to the point, some college officials say they are excited by some of the new offerings they are seeing from companies.

California State University was so taken by the ALEKS mathematics program, for example, that it has incorporated it into a newly introduced MathSuccess Web site, which it is promoting to collegebound high-school students to help them avoid remedial courses in college. On the site, students can take self-assessments of their readiness for college-level courses. Students who do not pass the ALEKS test can then sign up for the ALEKS math program. Cal State officials say the product can identify students' knowledge gaps and provide individualized instruction to fill them.

Elsewhere, a growing number of colleges are turning to companies like Smarthinking, a seven-year-old online-tutoring company, to enhance their remedial programs and beef up support to students.

Based in Washington, D.C., Smarthinking employs 400 tutors from around the world in its real-time tutoring service. Most of its business has come from colleges looking to provide an alternative to the campus tutoring center for students who take classes online or can't easily get to campus during regular tutoring hours. About 225 colleges buy its services directly or through consortia. The service is used at hundreds of other campuses through arrangements with publishers, as add-ons to students' textbooks.

Until recently, Smarthinking has not had a particular focus on remedial education, although many of the students who have used it may well have been taking such courses. Now it too is getting more directly into the business. For fall 2006, the company is introducing new products in writing and mathematics designed to serve the burgeoning market of underprepared college students. Colleges can buy the product, which Smarthinking calls Bridge to College, for use as a stand-alone tutorial or as part of an instructor-led class.

Burck Smith, Smarthinking's chief executive, says the company's ability to provide tutoring with the content is "the value added." Mr. Smith says he is optimistic. "We hopefully are catching the market at the right time," he says.

As it happens, Smarthinking already has some customers interested in the product who will begin using it this spring. One is a name that may ring familiar in the remedial field: Kaplan University, the online college that Kaplan Inc. started at just about the same time it was shuttering its remedial-education venture.