Persistence has been identified as an issue at all levels of higher education, and numerous strategies have been attempted to stem the flow of students who leave an institution before completing their programs of study. Persistence research abounds at the community college, four-year college and university levels, but little research on the subject is available at the postsecondary proprietary level. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to research and describe the developmental program recently undertaken at The Art Institute of Dallas (AID), and to compare the findings to the literature on community colleges. Objectives were to 1) examine the forces which caused AID to implement a developmental program; 2) examine how the program was perceived to be working; 3) compare the description of the program at AID to descriptions of those in community colleges, as described in the literature; 4) examine individual perceptions of benefits or drawbacks to the school as a direct result of the new program; and 5) determine if the key informants saw the developmental program as a vehicle to raise persistence and enhance student success. Originally, AID was an open admissions school, offering basic skills help only in tutorial situations. With the addition of General Education courses to the various curricula, the need for an Academic Improvement Center was discerned. Eventually, the school also saw the need to establish admissions standards, coupled with placement testing, to identify and serve underprepared students. Persistence became an issue, along with the state mandate of The Texas Academic Skills Program (TASP), and both contributed to the establishment of a comprehensive developmental education program. Results indicated the need for a student better prepared in numeracy and literacy skills, reflected in the requirements of employers needing employees with abilities to read technical documents, to write reports, to work in teams, and to solve problems. The findings of this study suggest the addition of a comprehensive developmental education program at AID positively affected student persistence. Just as the research on community college developmental studies history, development, and progress unfolded, so also went this postsecondary proprietary school. / Graduation date: 1998

This study was a quantitative multiple regression investigation into the relationships between campus factors of high school students graduating in 2013 who immediately enrolled in first-year college freshman level remedial coursework at a large, Central Texas two-year postsecondary institution. The goal of this study was to determine which high school campus-level factors predicted enrollment into college remedial education coursework. The dependent variable was a continuous variable representing the percentage of students from Texas public high school campuses enrolled into at least one student credit hour of remedial education during their first semester as a first-year college student. Eight high school campus-level independent variables were included in the regression model at the campus-level: at risk percentage, economically disadvantaged percentage, limited English proficient percentage, advanced course/dual-enrollment percentage, college ready math percentage, college ready English percentage, ACT average, and SAT average. Pearson correlations and linear regression results were examined and interpreted to determine the level of relationship between the eight selected variables and first-year college student remedial coursework. The multiple regression model successfully explained 26.3% (F(8,286) = 12.74. p < 0.05, r2 = 0.263) of the variance between first-year college students enrolled into remedial coursework at a large, Central Texas two-year postsecondary institution and the campus-level variables from high schools from which they graduated and indicated campus-level economic disadvantaged percentage and campus-level SAT average to be statistically significant at the p < 0.05 level.