Promising Solutions: Catapult Courses to Increase Credential Completion

How can postsecondary education institutions increase credential completion rates? Early academic success is paramount, with the momentum gained from reaching key milestones a powerful means of keeping learners engaged and moving towards the finish line (Source: FutureEd).

In Louisiana, the Board of Regents — which plans, coordinates, and budgets for all public higher education in the state — is using a suite of learner-centered strategies to help residents achieve upward mobility by completing high-quality credentials. In this spotlight on promising solutions in the field of postsecondary education and workforce training, we’ll focus on one of those strategies: certain courses early in an academic program that they call “catapult courses.”

Catapult courses grew out of the overwhelming success of the corequisite course model, a key component of their redesigned approach to first-year academic success. Indeed, like other states engaged in corequisite forms, Louisiana saw immediate and significant improvements in student outcomes. The year after kicking off their master plan for postsecondary education, Louisiana received a $300,000 Education Commission of the States Strong Start to Finish grant to scale their corequisite model. In the assessment of the state’s initial year providing both remedial math and corequisite math, 55% of all freshmen taking corequisite math passed, compared to 11% of those taking remedial math alone. As a result of this study, the state eliminated remedial courses in all colleges and universities and added corequisite English courses to the current offering of corequisite math (Source: Louisiana Board of Regents). In the 2023-24 academic year, the statewide overhaul led to a corequisite pass rate jump from 30% the previous academic year to 52% (Source: Inside Higher Ed).

Given the improvements in student success yielded by the corequisite model, the Louisiana Board of Regents is now looking at ways to strengthen the structure and pedagogy in other courses that are critical to learners’ later success. As Dr. Tristan Denley, the Louisiana Board of Regents’ Deputy Commissioner for Academic Affairs and Innovation, explains: “Catapult courses are, on the one hand, the courses where lack of success infects the whole rest of the curriculum almost immediately and things all fall apart. On the other hand, increasing success, deepening learning in these particular courses, not only helps students to be successful in those particular courses, but actually improves their learning across the whole of their educational journey and increases the graduation rate writ large.”

Watch the videos below to learn more from Dr. Denley about how catapult courses can deepen learning in a critical part of a program’s curriculum, thereby launching learners to the finish line.

What are catapult courses and how do they impact institution-wide student persistence and completion?

How do you identify catapult courses and how replicable is your method of identification?

Watch the full interview with Deputy Director Janice Hicks here.

As Dr. Denley and his colleagues move forward with this important work, they’ll take several measures to scale this initiative statewide while ensuring that catapult courses are tailored to each institutional context. All 28 Louisiana public colleges and universities will convene in April 2025 to discuss how they can bring the catapult course model to their campuses. The next phase of the Louisiana Board of Regents’ work will address what happens after learners complete their credentials. Focusing on the demands of the local labor market, they’ll develop strategies around career advising and embedding work-based learning so that learners can leverage the credential they’ve earned to begin a well-paying career.