▼ There are many debates surrounding remedial education: how it should be taught, by whom, who pays for it, and perhaps most importantly, if it works. Different trends have occurred throughout the history of the United States that have extended higher education opportunities to more and more individuals over time, and sometimes this has resulted in students attending college who were not prepared for the level of work required. Now, employment opportunities demand more education beyond the high school level than in the past, and access to college is being extended to anyone who receives a high school degree, but approximately 75% of higher education institutions have nearly one-third of their incoming freshmen who are not prepared for college-level work and consequently enroll in remedial courses. This study uses data from two public databases for 221 public four-year institutions with student populations greater than 10,000, to determine if remedial education is a benefit to these institutions in terms of graduation rates or first-year retention rates. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions are first run to decipher this. In order to attempt to control for other factors which may bias the OLS results, and thus more carefully isolate the effects of remediation, two additional approaches are used: 1) schools are matched with peer institutions and 2) a fixed effects model is employed to remove unobserved characteristics which do not change over time. The results show that remediation has a positive effect on graduation rates at institutions with SAT scores in the lowest quartile of the sample. As the academic student profile increases, remediation becomes less effective, to the point of being negative for 75% of the sample. Remediation is not shown to affect first-year retention positively or negatively. Advisors/Committee Members: Wilson, Kathryn.