Chancellor Zimpher Announces $1.8 Million to Support Math Competency, Decrease Remediation
December 7, 2015
Community College Pathways Programs Will Be Taken To Scale As SUNY Aims to Boost Completion
Student Success Rate of Quantway/Statway Twice That of Traditional Remedial Classes
Albany – State University of New York Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher today announced that SUNY was awarded $1.8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to bring the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Community College Pathways initiative to scale, reaching more community colleges and some four-year schools. The Pathways include Quantway and Statway, math competency programs with a national student success rate that is double the average of traditional remedial classes.
“Quantway and Statway prepare students for twice the success in half the time,” said Chancellor Zimpher. “The need for remediation in community college has become far too common and much too costly for our students as well as our campuses. As SUNY continues its work to increase college readiness and degree completion, evidence-based programs like these are critical. We are grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for this new funding and to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for their continued partnership in bringing the Community College Pathways to more SUNY students.”
Tony Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, said, “We are pleased to partner with SUNY to bring Quantway/Statway pathways to scale within the SUNY system and to help New York State students succeed in math and ultimately support their efforts to complete college.”
Students requiring remediation at SUNY’s community colleges are a reflection of the national average, with up to 70 percent enrolling in remedial courses each year and most requiring multiple levels of developmental math.
Four SUNY community colleges – Onondaga, Rockland, Suffolk, and Westchester – already offer Pathway courses now on their campuses. Another eight SUNY campuses – Broome, Fashion Institute of Technology, Finger Lakes, Mohawk Valley, Niagara, Schenectady, and Tompkins Cortland Community Colleges as well as SUNY Morrisville – will be involved in the scale-up over the next year, with funds available to support additional colleges that choose to participate in subsequent years.
Johanna Duncan-Poitier, SUNY Senior Vice Chancellor of Community Colleges and the Education Pipeline, said that faculty training and professional development are key to student success. “Quantway and Statway have introduced a powerful new faculty-driven pedagogical approach to teaching and learning that is proving to move the dial on student success like never before. Implementing these programs at scale presents an important new opportunity for our students and our faculty, alike, to decrease the need for and costs of developmental education in New York State.”
The $1.8 million investment will prepare more than 60 faculty members across SUNY to teach the curriculum and enroll as many as 20,000 students in Quantway and Statway courses over the next three years.
About the Community College Pathways
In 2010, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching initiated a network of faculty members, researchers, designers, students, and content experts to create a new system to increase student success in developmental mathematics. The network devised two new pathways—Statway and Quantway. These Pathways aim to accelerate students’ progress through their developmental mathematics sequence and a college-level course for credit. Statway® and Quantway® reduce the time required to earn college credit while improving the content and pedagogy of developmental mathematics. The Pathways present engaging, relevant, and useful mathematics concepts that students can use in their daily lives. Statway and Quantway are taught using common curricula, assessments, and online platform, and innovative instructional approaches. Quantway instruction is focused on quantitative reasoning, while Statway focuses on statistics, data analysis, and causal reasoning, combining college-level statistics with developmental math.
About the State University of New York
The State University of New York is the largest comprehensive system of higher education in the United States, and more than 95 percent of all New Yorkers live within 30 miles of any one of SUNY’s 64 colleges and universities. Across the system, SUNY has four academic health centers, five hospitals, four medical schools, two dental schools, a law school, the country’s oldest school of maritime, the state’s only college of optometry, and manages one US Department of Energy National Laboratory. In total, SUNY serves about 1.4 million students amongst its entire portfolio of credit- and non-credit-bearing courses and programs, continuing education, and community outreach programs. SUNY oversees nearly a quarter of academic research in New York. Research expenditures system-wide are nearly $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2023, including significant contributions from students and faculty. There are more than three million SUNY alumni worldwide, and one in three New Yorkers with a college degree is a SUNY alum. To learn more about how SUNY creates opportunities, visit suny.edu.
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