This story was produced in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit news organization that partners with local newsrooms to deliver expert coverage of higher education.

Alyssa Pfeifer always struggled with math. From elementary through high school, it was a source of frustration.

After taking seven years off from school — including a five-year stint with the Air Force — her math skills were rusty. Even the basics such as adding and subtracting fractions seemed like a chore. And now she was facing a special precalculus class at the College of Southern Nevada (CSN). 

It turned out to be just what she needed.

The class, Math 126E, is a more in-depth version of CSN's standard precalculus course, designed to provide additional instruction time and assistance for students who are not fully prepared for a traditional, three-hour college math course. It comes with built-in tutoring and a focus on study skills, and is billed as a five- or six-unit class to account for the extra support. 

"I was able to pass 126E with an A — first time in my life that I've ever passed a math class that well," Pfeifer said. 

The Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) five years ago implemented a new version of entry-level math and English college courses, known as a corequisite model. They allow students to skip as many as four semesters' worth of traditional remedial courses that were time consuming, costly and didn't count toward college credit. What's worse is they didn't help many students succeed — pupils would instead spin their wheels in remedial classes until they dropped college together.

Officials say the new approach is returning promising results as the rates of students passing entry-level English and math courses are higher now.

"We know we still have work to do, but our students are so much better off overall than they have been in the past under the older remedial model," said Renée Davis, NSHE's associate vice chancellor for academic and student affairs.

'Killing two birds with one stone'

Prior to the full implementation of the corequisite model in 2021, students with the poorest performances in math could be placed in the lowest of the four remedial math courses. It would take four semesters to pass them all, and only then could they enroll into an entry-level math course that counted for college credit. The process was shorter but similar for placement in English.

For many Nevada college students, these classes were a dead end. 

During the fall 2020 semester, 39 percent of students who were enrolled in remedial math classes would go on to pass their initial college-level math class, referred to as a gateway course, with a C or better within their first two semesters of initial enrollment at an NSHE institution. The rate was slightly lower for English at 37 percent. 

Historically, for every 100 students placed into a remedial course within NSHE's community colleges, only eight would graduate, according to a 2020 NSHE document. 

Seeing that traditional remediation was not working, NSHE officials shifted to a corequisite model, which allows struggling students to enroll in specialized versions of entry-level math or English courses. The name refers to the supportive services coming at the same time as the required class, in contrast to remedial classes, which are a prerequisite that must be passed before starting a required course.

It's a model that was fully or partially adopted in at least 29 states as of 2025. 

These classes are open to all students.

Those who were placed in a standard gateway English class or one of the three gateway math classes can also choose to enroll in the corequisite versions.  

Former NSHE Chancellor Thom Reilly pointed to data from states including Tennessee, California and Colorado, and earlier adopters within Nevada such as UNR that show the corequisite model is leading to more students passing their first-year English and math courses. 

"This approach allows students to 'kill two birds with one stone,' by completing the college-level work while also receiving needed remedial support designed to ensure greater success," he said in a 2019 statement. 

CSN Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs James McCoy said passing these gateway classes is the top indicator of whether a student will graduate. 

"The more people who complete math and English, the more people are going to get degrees or certificates, the more that are going to get into provocative careers that are important to our sustainability as an economic state," McCoy said. 

NSHE is also seeing a modest uptick of students who passed their corequisite class continuing on to their second year of college, which is referred as fall-to-fall persistence, or completing their degree or certificate. In fall 2024, 85 percent of students who passed their corequisite math class with a C or better persisted, 1 percentage point higher than the rate for their peers in a standard gateway math course, and 11 percentage points higher than the rate for students who passed remedial math, according to NSHE's data dashboard on gateway outcomes. 

The growth is less dramatic for English — a 75 percent persistence rate in fall 2024 for students who passed their corequisite English course compared with a 72 percent rate under the old model. 

Early data on graduations that captures students who enrolled in a corequisite class as early as from 2021 is promising but not conclusive. According to the data, more students at NSHE's four community colleges are graduating within three years, or six semesters, under the corequisite model compared with the traditional remedial model. 

"It does only stand to reason, right? Because we're not telling you you have to take two years of math classes before you can even take what's required," Davis said.

How does this work in practice

Teaching a class with students from all different skill levels is challenging. 

Under the previous model, Monina Deang, a math instructor at CSN, would have had an entire semester in a remedial course to teach students basic or intermediate algebra before they got to her precalculus class.

But under the new model, Deang spends the first two weeks of her course going over foundational math skills and concepts they will need for college-level precalculus and continues coming back to the basics as they go through the class before starting a new section. Deang likens this to building a bridge for students before crossing over to college level math.

Deang's class also features an aide who can help students keep up while she walks her class of about 20 students through math exercises.  

Pfeifer, who is now enrolled in Precalculus II, said the corequisite approach made a difference for her. 

"I'm more confident in my math skills than I have ever been in my entire life," said Pfeifer, who is going to be transferring to UNLV next semester to study kinesiology. "I feel like with the habits that I've learned being in 126E, I can pass any math course, regardless of how complex it is."

At Nevada State University, English associate professor Laura Decker said she builds close relationships with students in her corequisite English class so she can frequently check how they are doing, what their needs are and how to support them. 

Decker said instead of individual, at-home reading assignments, she has the class read together in small groups so they can get more comfortable with the reading at a slower pace. 

"So that's just two examples of how the corequisite is going to look a little different than 101, where we might just assume that we can give a reading and that students feel confident that they can turn in what we're looking for after reading," she said. 

She also offers students more feedback than they would receive in a typical college class. 

Rather than simply handing the students back their writing assignments with their grade and some feedback on it, Decker sets up time for students to come to her office to talk through it in depth. 

The courses are also helping first generation students. Kaytlin Gomez, a data science major at Nevada State University, was placed into Decker's corequisite course automatically as part of the institution's Nepantla program. 

Gomez said although she went to a Las Vegas college prep charter school, she wanted the extra support she'd get from a corequisite option to ease herself into a college-level class. 

"I had challenging courses at Equipo … but college is like a different ballgame," she said. 

No silver bullet

Patrick Villa, another CSN math professor, said in his experience, sending students straight into gateway math concepts under the corequisite model is working better for liberal arts and business majors, who need at most algebra-level math skills, than they are for STEM majors who start at the precalculus level. 

"Even with the extra time, it's so much math for somebody who's not good in math," Villa said. 

He said the old model gave students time to learn the basics and work their way up. 

"Now you take that same student who can barely add or subtract, and … we're going to get you ready to finish and do rational functions and equations in a couple of weeks. It's almost impossible," Villa said. 

According to CSN's data, from fall 2021 through spring 2025, on average, less than 50 percent of students passed the corequisite version of the precalculus class with a C-minus or better, not counting students who withdrew from the course. 

And Black students who take a math corequisite class aren't faring as well as their peers. In fall 2024, Black students had the lowest math completion under the new model, 47 percent. It's still higher than their completion rate under the old model, about 35 percent for fall 2020, but below other student groups that have completion rates of about 57 percent or better.

On the English side at NSU, Decker has found that the students who don't pass her corequisite course also have attendance issues. 

"I would say with a lot of confidence that if a student fails a corequisite class, they're not coming to that class, because the support is there, the feedback is there, the desire to help students learn and to get in touch with their needs is there," she said. "I just think there's a lot of pressure on students that can get in the way of them being in the classroom."

Rather than fully eliminating remedial math classes, Villa argued that students should have the choice to go through the longer remedial route or the shorter corequisite route.

"I get that the old way is not good. It's expensive … and people aren't making it," he said. "But there is a little contingent who really need that slowdown. They need that full gauntlet. Give them that choice."

McCoy said "the old way doesn't work." 

But he's hoping a new CSN pilot program approved by the Board of Regents last month for students struggling with the precalculus corequisite course will be a good middle ground.

The pilot program will identify students who are at risk of failing their corequisite precalculus class and give them the option to "parachute" into an easier course partway through the semester, where they will be able to improve on their math skills while having a greater focus on college readiness skills such as studying — without the penalty of failing the original class.

"What we find sometimes was that it wasn't that students were debilitated necessarily by the content of the course, they were debilitated … by the overwhelming lack of knowing how to learn the material," McCoy said. 

The pilot program will start this fall and last through summer 2028. 

Students who pass the parachute course will be allowed to take the standard precalculus course. 

But McCoy said this work isn't cheap. 

Currently, CSN's corequisite math courses, which are at class capacity, are only able to serve approximately 62 percent of students who need the course. 

CSN expects to ask lawmakers for an additional $1.64 million during the 2027 legislative session to add eight more full-time faculty to support an additional 1,700 students. 

"There's not enough tuition dollars or state resource dollars coming in to support hiring more math faculty," McCoy said. "We need some sort of state support under this new model, if completing math is important to our state."