Incidentally, the Washington-based Complete College America organization timed the release of its report to coincide with the NBC television network’s Education Nation Summit broadcast event. The remediation topic surfaced prominently during one of the televised Education Nation panel discussions.

“It’s a huge issue, and it leads to many problems. It leads to retention issues,” said Chicago City Colleges Chancellor Cheryl Hyman at NBC’s national education summit in New York.

In Chicago, about 90 percent of students start in remedial college classes, said Jones. This has driven Hyman to push for dual-enrollment programs with high schools in the city and to create a six-week summer bridge program for seniors.

Hyman spoke on a panel discussion titled, “A Matter of Degrees: Measuring the Value of Higher Ed,” with University of Texas at Brownsville President Juliet V. García. More and more students need to work to pay for their hefty college tuitions, according to the report, detracting from their studies. One way to keep students on track and allow them to work is by providing a lot of on-campus jobs, said García.

“We’re talking about inclusion, not exclusion,” she said, adding that on-campus jobs allow commuter students to build more of a network at school. The study revealed that block scheduling is an effective way to allow students to work and keep them in school, too, said Jones. Twenty-seven technical centers in Tennessee have a graduation rate of 75 percent because they offer block scheduling.

Complete College America culled graduation information from 33 states that has gone undetected by the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), because the feds don’t look at the graduation rates of nontraditional students.

“No one has collected this much data nationwide on these students,” said Jones. “I think there will be a lot of follow-up on these issues.”