In the fall of 2023, Texas’ community colleges enrolled over 676,000 students, an increase of 4 percent since 2021 and a return to prepandemic levels. These enrollment numbers suggest that many students in the state still view community college as a pathway to greater educational and economic opportunities after the pandemic. However, over 60 percent of students enrolling in a Texas community college in fall 2023 were deemed not ready to take college-level courses in math, reading, or writing. This statistic raises two important questions: (1) How can Texas colleges best identify students who are college-ready and (2) how can they best serve students who are not?

Currently, many incoming college students in Texas are placed into college-level coursework based only on their scores on the Texas Success Initiative Assessment 2.0, a statewide standard­ized test. However, evidence suggests that test-only placement systems can mistakenly assess substantial numbers of students as “not college-ready”; in other words, they may not reflect a student’s true ability to succeed in college-level coursework. In recent years, multiple measures assessment (MMA) has emerged as a promising alternative. MMA is a placement method that relies on more than one indicator—such as cumulative high school grade point averages, high school course-taking patterns, or standardized test scores—to assess students’ college readi­ness. Previous studies suggest that MMA, when used to allow more students to take college-level courses, can increase course completion and credit accumulation in college.

During the fall 2024 semester, MDRC partnered with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to conduct a rigorous evaluation of MMA placement policies at two community colleges in the state. This study was designed to provide evidence on the effectiveness of MMA in Texas community colleges, with the potential to inform changes to statewide placement policies. Most past research on MMA was conducted under a prerequisite developmental education system, which required students to complete one or more non-credit-bearing courses before enrolling in college-level coursework. As of 2025, however, Texas and at least 28 other states have shifted to a corequisite model, in which students enroll in a college-level course and re­ceive related academic support at the same time. Findings from this study will help assess the effectiveness of MMA placement policies in this corequisite course context.

The initial findings from this study demonstrate that using multiple measures to place students increased first-semester college-level math completion rates by 1.9 percentage points but had no discernable effect on college-level English completion rates. Only one semester of data were available for this report, which makes degree-completion effects impossible to observe at this time. However, college credits earned—an early indicator of progress toward a degree—showed a statistically significant positive effect of 0.4 credits. These findings suggest that MMA can be used successfully in the state of Texas.