College while in high school: How dual credit is aiming for equity

Rafael Sierra, a high schooler in Baytown, Texas, has never been one to skate through life – or school. When things get tough, he’ll hear his father saying “ponte las pilas” – “put the batteries in” – and knuckle down.

So when he was told by a middle school teacher that he could take college courses in high school, for free, he jumped at the chance. He saw it as a way to be challenged, to save money on college tuition, and, above all, to make his Mexican immigrant parents and three older siblings, who paved his path to college, proud.

Five years – and nearly 50 credits – later, Rafael is part of a nationwide boom in “dual credit” learning being driven by a quest to lower the time and cost of a college degree. Almost four decades after Minnesota launched the first statewide program, a majority of high schools offer dual credit, and roughly 10% of their students take them, federal data shows.

Once seen as a way to stave off “senioritis” among top students, the dual credit option is now widely viewed as a tool to advance equity, with the potential to close long-standing racial and socioeconomic gaps in college completion. Studies show that students who take the courses are more likely to enroll in and finish college than those who don’t.

Yet in much of the country, the courses still aren’t reaching many of the low-income, rural, and minority students who might benefit from them the most. Though about one-third of white students took at least one dual credit class in 2019, only about a quarter of Hispanic, Asian, and Native American students, and almost a fifth of Black students, did.

These long-standing gaps have been attributed to everything from the programs’ cost and eligibility criteria, to teacher shortages, to a lingering misperception that the courses are for gifted students only.  

Now, in the midst of a pandemic that is causing disproportionate numbers of low-income students to put off college, some states, colleges, and school districts are tackling those barriers head-on, lowering costs, relaxing strict entrance requirements, and aggressively recruiting underrepresented students into the programs. Lee College, which provides the courses at Rafael’s school, has begun accepting students on the cusp of eligibility who have the motivation and support to succeed in a college-level course, according to Marissa Moreno, executive director of school and college partnerships.

In Ohio, community colleges are seeking a state waiver to expand options for admission to technical programs beyond the current test score and grade requirements, as Intel and other local employers clamor for more skilled workers, says Marcia Ballinger, president of Lorain County Community College in Elyria.

“Some kids are not good test-takers,” adds Ann Schloss, superintendent of the county’s Elyria City School District, “but that doesn’t always mean they won’t be able to succeed in the class.”

Dual credit advocates say placement tests often exclude low-income students of color from dual credit programs because test scores are highly correlated with race and income. Recognizing this, some districts offered alternate paths to admission even before the pandemic. Lee College let students who achieved close-to-qualifying scores on its placement test qualify through a college admissions exam (ACT or SAT) or state high school end-of-course exam. Lorain County Community College received waivers for two technical programs at Elyria High School.

But COVID-19, which shut down testing for several months, forced more programs to experiment with new ways of admitting students. In doing so, the pandemic ushered in a “massive nationwide test of moving to multiple measures of eligibility,” says Alex Perry, coordinator of the College in High School Alliance. Some states have stuck with their new systems, he says.

And it’s not just community colleges that are stepping up. Last fall, Benedict College, a historically Black college in Columbia, South Carolina, announced that it would offer online courses – and guaranteed admission – to students in the Fresno Unified School District, while a national nonprofit said it would subsidize online courses for dual credit students at Claflin University, another South Carolina HBCU.

Meanwhile, some districts are heeding calls from the Biden administration to invest a portion of their pandemic recovery funds in expanding access to dual credit.

In Buffalo, New York, federal dollars were used to hire a dual enrollment coordinator. In Frederick County, Maryland, the money paid for textbooks and instructor training for a new course designed for English-language learners, a severely underrepresented demographic group, according to Diana Sung, the district’s dual enrollment coordinator.

Colorado, a state that has made significant progress in closing racial equity gaps in its dual credit programs, is now turning its attention to disabled students, challenging the assumption that they don’t belong in college-level courses, says Carl Einhaus, the state’s senior director of student success and P-20 alignment.  

But progress across the country has been uneven, and most states still don’t demand the disaggregated data from schools that would allow them to identity underrepresented groups of students and target resources to them, says Sharmila Mann, a principal at Education Commission of the States (ECS). A recent analysis by the commission found that while close to half of states require high schools to offer a dual credit program, only six set aside scholarships for underserved students, or require colleges to do so.

For families of all income levels, the cost of dual credit courses varies widely. Roughly half of states offer free tuition in at least one dual credit program, but of the other half, a dozen cover only a portion of the cost, and another dozen provide no public funding for dual credit, according to the Community College Research Center, which analyzed the ECS data. Meanwhile, some school districts and colleges subsidize their programs for students, and some don’t. It all depends on state policy and local agreements between schools and colleges, which can make it confusing for families to sort out, Ms. Mann says.

The explosive growth of dual credit has been a godsend for the nation’s community colleges, offsetting steep enrollment declines among recent high school graduates and older adults that were magnified by the pandemic. The number of dually enrolled students in community colleges nationally shot up by 11.5% this past fall, even as overall enrollment fell, data from the National Student Clearinghouse shows.

But it’s not clear that replacing regular students with dually enrolled ones is a sustainable strategy for the struggling sector, says John Fink, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center. That’s because two-year colleges often aren’t fully reimbursed for the cost of running the program – either by the state or by the school district. If the colleges hope to make up for their losses, Mr. Fink says, they’ll have to convince more high school students to continue their education after they graduate.

And that will only happen if community colleges put dual credit students on a course to a credential while they’re still in high school, ensuring that their credits transfer to that credential, Mr. Fink and others argue. Lee College is among those experimenting with this “pathways” approach.

“When students have a sense of purpose, they’re more likely to finish their degrees,” says Josh Wyner, executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute.

Rafael, who will have completed the core curriculum for Texas public colleges by the time he graduates in May, says his parents – a stay-at-home mother and a pipeline heater in the local plants – never pressured him or his siblings to pursue college. But they understood its value.

“Dad always tells me, ‘You don’t want to wake up at 5 a.m., not being with your family, struggling with the heat and cold,’” Rafael says. “He says, ‘I want you to get a good office job so you can be comfortable.’”

Rafael is still figuring out what that job will be, but he’s leaning toward accounting.

“I want to build a foundation for our family to have generational wealth,” he says. “Everything I do is for my family.”