The effectiveness of remedial courses: new evidence from undergraduate students in industrial engineering

Remedial courses may support under-prepared candidates for higher education, but their effectiveness is still questioned especially in European countries, where their introduction is comparably recent. This paper implements a doubly robust estimator to account for heterogeneity between remedial and nonremedial students and possible noncompliance with the assigned remediation. Data on five cohorts of undergraduates in industrial engineering from an Italian university show average worse performances of remedial students. However, remedial students who complete the remedial path catch up in two years with the dropout rate of average nonremedial students and with the credits earned by the weakest nonremedial students.