The CSU ended stand-alone remedial courses in 2018. It did not end the need for remediation.

What Executive Order 1110 did

The document shows: EO 1110, signed by Chancellor Timothy P. White on August 2, 2017, discontinued the Entry Level Mathematics and English Placement tests (Section IV.D), required placement by "multiple measures of academic proficiency" (Section IV), required first-year students to enroll in their general-education written communication and math/quantitative reasoning courses during the first year (Section V.A), and directed that students needing support take college-level credit-bearing courses with "co-requisite" support, supplemental instruction, or "stretch" formats, with pre-baccalaureate content capped at one unit (Section V.B). Early Start "participation is required for students needing skills development" (Section VI.D) and from summer 2019 was to offer primarily credit-bearing GE courses (Section VI.C).

The document shows: the CSU's own later description. The March 2025 report to the Legislature says EO 1110 "discontinued standalone, non-credit–bearing developmental education courses" (p. 3). The March 2019 Board item says that "Beginning fall 2018, no CSU student was required to enroll in a stand-alone developmental education course" (p. 4). Neither document says that students no longer need developmental support; both describe where that support now happens.

Graph 1. The first-term headline, and what it measures

The document shows: in fall 2017, students judged not ready for college math were routed into developmental courses; only 1,438 attempted a lower-division math course in their first term, and 950 passed. In fall 2018 the same population, now placed in supported credit courses, attempted 11,988 (or 11,719, in the Board item) and 7,952 passed. The CSU reported this as an eightfold increase in passing (Board item, p. 5) and as a jump from 5 percent to 46 percent of the cohort passing a college math course in the first term.

The evidence suggests: the eightfold figure measures access to a credit course in the first term, which the old structure forbade, not improved learning. Among students who attempted the course, the pass rate was 66 percent in both years (deck, slide 14). The share of the whole entering class meeting the math requirement within one year rose from 63 to 74 percent between the fall 2017 and fall 2018 cohorts, which is the better measure of the policy, and it has since drifted back to 70 percent (Graph 1b).

Graph 2. Category II versus Category IV, five cohorts

From the fall 2020 cohort onward the CSU's annual legislative report breaks outcomes out by placement category. The categories are defined in the 2025 report (p. 3):

Source: 2025 report, pp. 8, 11, 14, 18. The "met by end of second fall" column is timepoint D; its column order was re-derived from the narrative totals (70% math and 75% written communication at timepoint C) and should be confirmed against the PDF.

The document shows: for the fall 2023 cohort, students placed with support and Early Start in math (Category IV) persisted to a second fall at 68 percent against 86 percent for students placed directly (Category II), completed 17 first-year units against 26, and held a 1.98 GPA against 2.95. By the end of the second fall, 53 percent of Category IV students had met the math requirement against 81 percent of Category II. The written communication gap is wider: 63 versus 83 percent persistence, 15 versus 24 units, 1.80 versus 2.79.

The evidence suggests: the gap is stable across five cohorts, narrowing slightly for the fall 2024 cohort (71 versus 87 percent in math). It is not closing on its own.

The record does not yet establish how much of the gap is attributable to preparation itself, to the supports, or to everything else that correlates with placement, including income, first-generation status, and high school. The reports present no controls and make no causal claim, and neither does this page.

Graph 3. Campus variation: Dominguez Hills and Long Beach

Source: CSU Academic Preparation reports 2023, 2024, 2025, campus tables. Text extraction could not bind campus labels to rows with certainty; the fall 2023 block (1,721 students) matched every figure independently checked, and the 2021 and 2022 blocks (2,048 and 2,062 students) are flagged "alignment uncertain" until read directly from the PDF.

The document shows: at Dominguez Hills, 56 percent of the fall 2023 cohort was placed in math with support (Categories III and IV), against 34 percent systemwide. Category IV persistence at Dominguez Hills was 58 percent against 68 percent systemwide; Category II, 78 against 86. The gap between II and IV inside the campus, 20 points, is similar to the system's 18.

The document shows (secondary source): Long Beach's College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics reported on September 16, 2026 that 90 percent of its fall 2024 first-year students had met the B4 requirement by the end of the third semester, against a CSU average of 77 percent, and that among students needing additional support the figures were 81 and 59 percent. These come from a campus news article citing the 2026 legislative report and the CSU Student Success Dashboard, which requires CSU credentials; the per-campus table behind them could not be reliably read from the report PDF.

What might explain the gap: Dominguez Hills and Long Beach practices

Public web pages and catalogs, checked October 31, 2026. "Not found" means not located on the pages checked, not that the practice does not exist.

The evidence suggests four differences worth testing. First, Long Beach built separately numbered co-requisite courses that attach to each GE pathway, while Dominguez Hills folds support into 4-unit integrated sections and a precalculus course with supplemental instruction; the integrated model is harder to see, staff, and evaluate from outside. Second, Long Beach uses a mathematics diagnostic (ALEKS PPL) on top of the CSU's multiple measures; no diagnostic is visible at Dominguez Hills, where writing placement is by a self-placement survey. Third, Long Beach describes a decade-old faculty committee that owns the redesign and publishes its results; Dominguez Hills publishes no comparable account. Fourth, the two campuses start from different populations: 56 percent of Dominguez Hills first-year students were placed in math with support in fall 2023, so the same support model has to carry a far larger share of the entering class than it would at a campus near the system average of 34 percent.

The record does not yet establish that any of these practices causes the difference. A fair comparison would need the per-campus category tables for both campuses across the five cohorts, the staffing and cost of each support model, and the distribution of high school preparation within each category. None of that is public.

Open questions this section is pursuing

• Per-campus outcomes by placement category for all 22 campuses and five cohorts, in a machine-readable form rather than a PDF whose tables resist extraction.
• What each campus spends on co-requisite sections, supplemental instruction, Early Start, and tutoring per Category III and IV student, and from what funds.
• Early Start: how many students are required to participate, how many pay the $191-per-unit fee, how many receive the waiver, and what the summer courses accomplish.
• Whether the Student Success Dashboard, which carries category-level data and requires CSU credentials, can be opened to the public.
• The discrepancies in the CSU's own first-term reporting (11,719 versus 11,988 attempts; 6,014 versus 6,121; two different percentage bases for the same completions).

Disclosure: the author teaches at Dominguez Hills and has served in its Academic Senate; he has no role in its mathematics or writing programs and writes here as an individual.