What drives colleges and universities to offer dual enrollment classes for high school students? Well, many colleges and universities have experienced significant declines in freshmen enrollment in the last ten years—accelerated by the COVID-19 shutdown but continuing since. Some have regained ground by enrolling more transfer and graduate students, but the outlook remains bleak.
This is partly a matter of demographics—fewer students to go around—and partly a matter of the sharp drop in public confidence in what the colleges actually do. That drop in confidence, in turn, reflects two factors. One is public recognition that a college degree is no longer a golden ticket to a good job or a good career. The other—related—is that a college degree is seen as a badge of having been indoctrinated in political views that most of the American public rejects. A third factor driving dual enrollment is the efforts of colleges and universities to capture more minority students. For example, Bard College runs a program called Bard Early College, a tuition-free program that focuses on “Dismantling systemic inequities that inhibit access based on race, immigration status, class, (dis)ability, sexual orientation or gender expression.” In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard and UNC, these dual admission programs may be a way for some colleges and universities to sustain minority preference admissions.
Colleges and universities, in general, are unwilling to face up to these realities and are searching for ways to continue business as usual. That means filling the classrooms with any students they can get—within limits. The limits are admitting students whose presence would undermine the credibility of the curriculum. But some colleges skate very close to those limits.
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Admitting exceptionally talented high school students to a class or two is not a brand-new practice.
Colleges have been doing that at least since the 19th century. But the word “exceptional” applies literally. This wasn’t a way of filling empty seats. It was a way of accommodating the rare prodigies with talent in math, languages, or other areas far beyond well-trained college students. The new game is admitting ordinary high school students to get them settled on the college’s curriculum and student culture.
The transition is easy since many colleges have lowered their standards to a level barely above high school standards. And the model of community colleges provides a handy way for four-year colleges to figure out which courses lend themselves to this mild form of deception. I say “deception” because the students who take the bait and—after taking some courses as high school students—go to enroll as full-time students are failing in their responsibility to survey and explore their other options. They are taking an easy path, and one that generally leads to a mediocre program.
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The colleges pursuing this approach to boosting enrollments probably include a fair number whose financial position is shaky. However, others are just trying to keep their options open as the market for four-year college programs continues to erode and new forms of competition arise. I suspect we will soon see the rise of more programs that submerge the high school diploma in a five or six-year combined high school/college undergraduate degree program or even a high-school-through-masters-degree program.
What we are seeing is a lowering of standards and an acceleration of degree inflation in pursuit of the declining number of domestic students who are truly interested in what undergraduate programs have to offer.
Follow the National Association of Scholars on X.
Image of Early College Initiative Students Welcomed to College of DuPage 2015 — Flickr
The other question is who’s paying for all of this?
If the classes are physically taught in the high school, there are quite a few costs inherently shifted to the high school (and the K-12 taxpayers). More if the high school teachers assist in administration (or even instruction) of the classes. At the very least, we should be up front about this and tell the taxpayers about it.
Then there is the question of how much the high school (and K-12 taxpayers) are paying the university for these classes. Or how much an outside third party (e.g. donor, state government) is paying for this program to happen. Universities are not above franchising their degree granting status, but they usually want to make money in the process.
The second related question when this becomes minority outreach is the extent to which the Federal government is paying for it. If the NSF can give UMass a grant to hire graduate students in the sciences on the basis of race (and it did), I wouldn’t be surprised that some of the grant money sloshing around out there funds things like this.
And a third question is how are dual enrollment students counted? If you put them in your FTE or headcount, it serves to conceal the number of traditional undergraduates that you don’t have anymore. This is valuable for a public institution going to the legislature for funding, and for all in approaching donors.
So I think that we need to follow the money on this. Who is paying for it — and why?
There’s one other thing not being mentioned — college freshman classes are less rigorous than the same classes in high school, and it’s been this way since at least the 1950s.
Historically there were two reasons for this. First, each high school has its own curriculum with emphasis on different aspects of the same subject. For example, one high school may teach Physics with an emphasis on light and electromagnetism, another might teach it with an emphasis on kinetic and potential energy. Hence introductory courses in high school subjects so that everyone was “on the same page”, so to speak.
The other purpose of these freshman courses was to serve as a safety net. There is a major transition from the highly structured life of a high school student to the totally unstructured life of a college student, and institutions really didn’t want to flunk out those students with genuine academic potential once they matured into collegiate life.
Then when you threw in remediation, teaching middle school subjects on the college level, and these courses became considerably less rigorous than the same high school course. This becomes known and the high school students then start taking the college courses because they (a) are easier while (b) are weighted higher on their GPA.
In addition to all the issues Dr. Wood mentions, I fear that dual enrollment is setting kids up for academic failure. Freshman year is a major life adjustment and if these kids are making it as sophomores or even juniors — when they are expected to have their acts together — they aren’t going to make it.
For example, my undergraduate university sent freshman mid-semester evaluations — a list of the courses you were taking and if you were currently passing or failing each. Today there are a lot more things being done to prevent freshman attrition. And dual enrollment skips all of this…