The Wild West of Dual Enrollment: Its Growth, Benefits, and Drawbacks

Michael When I admitted myself in three admissions offices back in 2018, it was the first time that I really heard about the prevalence of dual enrollment courses, which kept showing up over and over again on high school transcripts of applicants along with AP and IB courses.

And you probably didn't have the full scope of just how big dual enrollment has become. Jeff the most recent national data show that about 88% of American high schools offer dual enrollment. 88%. And get this, one third of students take these college courses in high school. So with dual enrollment a major part of the school day in high schools and with repercussions further upstream in Higher Edge, today we're going to take a deep dive on what dual enrollment really is, if it really helps students, and how we can ensure quality courses. On this episode of Future youe.

This episode is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information policy, and institutional transformation. This episode of Future youe is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org

I'm Jeff Salingo.

And I'm Michael Horn.

So, Michael, we've been wanting to do an episode on dual enrollment for a while. I know for me it's not only since I was in those three admissions offices, but then last fall, in preparation for a talk to community college leaders in Arkansas, I read this working paper from researchers at the Community College Research center at Columbia University Teachers College. And you know what that paper found? Dual enrollment accounts for nearly one in five community college students nationally. And so we've been talking about the decline in community college enrollment during the pandemic. So the proportion of high school students making up community college enrollment seems to have only grown as a result of dual enrollment.

And the ramifications of this shift, Jeff, I'm not sure are fully appreciated, frankly, by those in either K12 or higher ed. And one, of course, is the shifting cost burden of dual enrollment. In many states, the dual enrollment courses are charged a lower tuition rate than those paid for by older post secondary students. And in that same working paper, Jeff, that you cited from the Community College Research center, they found that for the typical community college, revenues from the courses cover roughly only 72 to 85% of the costs.

Yeah, Michael, I feel like this huge growth in dual enrollment is one of those things that kind of just happened in education when the public wasn't really paying attention. And I get increasingly asked about it when I'm visiting high schools. Just the day before we're taping this, I was speaking to college and career counselors as part of their professional development in Fairfax County Public schools. That's Fairfax county in Virginia. And on the way out of that talk, a counselor approached me to ask me what I thought of dual enrollment courses because they're being pushed by the state, by the county and the parents to do more. And so today on Future youe, we're welcoming John Fink. John is a senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research center and one of the authors of that working paper we just mentioned. John, welcome to Future youe.

Thank you.

So, John, when people talk about dual enrollment, it seems, from our perspective anyway, we're actually lumping a lot of different arrangements under the same umbrella. Can you give us a sense for the wide range of arrangements for D enrollment and all the different variables in play?

Sure. So I think dual enrollment is an umbrella term. I think at some point somebody said there's like 36 different terms for dual enrollment, but there's a lot of different arrangements. So the sort of definition is any sort of arrangement where a student, before they complete high school, is taking a course for college credit through a partnership with a post secondary institution. So it's not AP or ib, but it can be called dual credit, concurrent enroll, dual enrollment, early college high schools. And so it can vary by the location. Is the course taught at the high school or at the college or online? Can vary by the instructor. Is it a college instructor or a high school teacher that has the qualifications to teach the course? And it can be very intensive models like early college high schools where students are on a track to complete an associate degree. Or it can be like my experience where I just took an English 101 course in high school and that was just my one course that I took. Primarily it is like 80% of dual enrollment, broadly speaking, nationally, is at the high school model primarily with a high school instructor. And then probably the second most common is at the college with a college instructor. But it can be many different arrangements, but it's typically at the high school.

And what do we know about who these dual enrollment courses have served historically and who perhaps they're increasingly serving. Can you put some numbers behind the size of these programs?

Sure, yeah. They've been around for decades, but they've really taken off like in the last 10 or 20 years, in fall of 2021, most recent year we have data there's about 1.5 million high school students taking college courses. Most of that's at community colleges. So about 70% of dual enrollment nationally is at community colleges, but a good chunk is at four year institutions and they've really sort of grown up as courses for university bound students on the advanced academic track. But there's been a lot of increased awareness around their potential to be an on ramp and really serve as a college access strategy. The other thing I should say is over the years a lot of researchers have looked at the benefits of these courses and there's really a strong evidence based around benefits of participation in their many different shapes and sizes in terms of high school grades, college enrollment and college degree completion. With really the strongest evidence around the early college high school models where there have been random, randomized control trials showing how well those serve students after high school.

Yeah. So John, can we talk a little bit about the outcomes historically for these programs? What do we know about which types of arrangements do the most for those who will end up in college? So encouraging that college going, as you were saying, persisting in college and graduation and really for whom.

Right. And one thing that's tricky is that there is a lot of different ways that these programs are implemented and it's often hard to do a really rigorous evaluation. The best research we have is the sort of randomized trials where students are sort of lottery into an early college high school. And those have shown really strong 10, 20 percentage point gains on college enrollment and completion for participants. But the vast majority of students taking these courses are in more sort of casual or a la carte versions of dual enrollment. And there's been a lot of different correlational designs to show the benefits. It's oftentimes hard to control for unobserved factors like just the students wanting to go to college. But I think as a research community we're really shifting from, from not just asking do these programs work, but how can we make them work better and for more students and truly broaden the benefits? Because the research we've done also shows that a lot of students are being left out of these courses. Black, Hispanic, Native American, English learners, students with disabilities, men across many of these categories are all underrepresented when we compare to who's in high school. And there's been research showing that the students who participate from these groups really do benefit, oftentimes benefit more than other students. Real focus on broadening the benefits of these programs.

And so there's really no way to track these Students, even at the state level, through a unit record type of thing, where we know kind of who took one in high school, where they went to college, how they performed in college, there's really no way to do that right now.

We do have a ways to do it and we have been doing it and that's our sort of ongoing work. Now in 2017, we looked with National Student Clearinghouse data on students who took a dual enrollment course in high school and what happened to them after high school. And as you would expect, these students are enrolling in college at very high rates and they're completing degrees at very high rates. There's some variation across state, but overall these are very strong outcomes. Just descriptively, what we're working on now is more fine grained analysis, both with clearinghouse as well as within state data, where you have strong data systems like in Texas, that have linked the K12, the postsecondary and the workforce outcomes to look to see how many credits, which types of credits, what sort of complementary high school courses, how does that all combine and pay off for students in the long run, both post secondary in terms of degree completion and in the labor market?

I guess the payoff we tend to think of, well, if they're going to college and they're graduating, then that's a good thing. But should there be also a payoff, for example, that it saves them time? Should that be considered a payoff?

Absolutely. And we do see some descriptive evidence of that. Like when we track this cohort of students who had some prior dual enrollment and were entering higher education like we were, just by nature of the data, we were only able to look at them 5 years after high school and their 5 year degree completion rates look very similar to other students 6 year degree completion rates. So we do see some suggestive evidence that this is accelerating completion, but it's something we need to look into more.

Yeah, there seems to be a lot more questions sometimes than answers on this front. So staying on this, I'm kind of curious about the incentives underlying lots of these programs. We know that as states have increasingly pushed dual enrollment, they've introduced funding in a variety of ways. There have been reports that suggest that in some cases community colleges lose money when they enroll students or still in high school. I'm sure that's not uniform, but then again, perhaps it's a way for them to get students they wouldn't have otherwise enrolled after they graduate from high school. So can you talk us through the variability of state arrangements and what are the different financial incentives for both districts and community colleges.

Well, I think first thinking about the incentives from the state perspective, this is dual enrollment. It's grown, and it continues to grow because it's a very popular and bipartisan issue. This is a way to address affordability access concerns around higher education. And so there, you know, dozens of state legislatures, just like in 2019 alone, are taking up bills to expand access to dual enrollment. That a lot of times comes down to how it's funded. If it's free to students or families, that's kind of like one of the main barriers. The eligibility requirements and then the availability of qualified instructors. Those are major levers that states can support institutions to expand the programs. But what we've been focusing on is at the institutional level, there are really interesting incentives and sort of an incentive landscape for community colleges and K12s and four years really, to invest in a different way of implementing dual enrollment, One that's more focused on building momentum for college and increasing college access. And like you said, in many states, how it's funded, this can be sort of a loss leader for community colleges. I said before that the most common type of dual enrollment course taking is at the high school. So if it's at the high school and a high school instructor is teaching it, this is a pretty cheap course to offer, maybe like 30, 40 bucks a credit, say, just for example. And we've looked at the economics here, but at the same time, colleges are maybe not getting reimbursed at all or getting just a portion of that reimbursement, whether it's at the high school or even at the college. Sometimes based on the funding, they're only getting a portion of that revenue, even if it's offered at a cheaper rate. So it can be a financial loss for colleges to offer these courses. And what we've heard from college leaders is, as we see now, one in five community college students is a high school student. And at some colleges, it's like a third of their students or more are high school. So if they're not really gaining revenues, they're asking, like, how is this financially sustainable to have dual enrollment at such a large share of headcount?

I was recently speaking to some principals and counselors in Ohio. You probably saw an audit that came out in Ohio recently around dual enrollment. The way they described this, it was kind of a little bit like the wild west, right? They. They had students coming onto campus, leaving campus. You know, athletes love this because it gives them, like, flexibility to take courses. Their AP enrollments are down, but their Dual enrollments are up, and there's also these weird incentives because they think colleges are kind of taking essentially their money. Right. There's only so much money in the pie for education in Ohio, and they think this is money that would have gone to K through 12, and now it's going to higher ed. Like, it seems to me that there is a little bit of a wild west. And are we kind of just transferring funds from what would have gone to K12 to community colleges in this case?

Yeah, it kind of depends on how it's set up, but that can happen where the funding that was going to teach a student this course, they're taking the college course instead. So some amount of funding is flowing to the college. Sometimes that's flowing through the K12s or coming from the states directly. I think what we're. It is sort of like a wild West. There's a lot of different sort of arrangements. Oftentimes these can be negotiated, like between one college and a school district. And a college could be working with dozens of school districts. Some states, like Ohio, have put sort of guardrails on what those policies can look like. What are the sort of amounts that can be charged per credit, what sort of practices and policies need to be put into place in terms of advising and outreach and recruitment. But I think what we've been focusing on, what I think is encouraging, is that college leaders that sort of get this perspective of the potential of dual enrollment as a college access and equity strategy are, yes, there are some additional investments that need to be made around providing, advising, doing outreach and recruitment, taking the time to build those partnerships with the high school colleagues. But there can be large returns in the future, because if you look at typical communities, I don't know, depending on where you're looking, we're looking at half of high school graduates not going to any college at all. That's not because they can't. It's just because they don't see the purpose or the value. Dual enrollment, we know, has this track record of getting students started on a college degree plan to be coming back to the community college after high school. And that's one of those levers. People call it yield, that sort of yield rate of bringing a student back. These students are retained at higher rates, they're passing courses at higher rates, they're completing at higher rates. So they're good investments. And the leaders we talk to are really focused. It's not about pulling students away from the universities. We want students to go to universities and get bachelor's degree right away. It's about getting that student who's sort of on the margin of going to any college and getting them started on an exciting college pathway in high school that they can continue at the community college after high school. And that really does sort of balance out that financial issue and is a big incentive for many colleges.

John, thinking about that set of questions of getting a student to actually enroll, getting them to perhaps then transfer to a four year bachelor's at some point, there's a whole host of this that's outside the control of any one community college or high school. You know, namely the transferring of credits to other institutions. That that's a challenge throughout higher ed. It's not unique to dual enrollment, but I'm just sort of curious how that plays out in the dual enrollment space specifically and if there are things that policymakers or others should be doing about it.

Yeah, there's a lot of overlap in general with the transferability of community college credits to a bachelor's degree for non dual enrollment students, as there are for current and prior dual enrollment students. There's some things that don't overlap like you do see these cases where four year institutions, just as a matter of principle or policy, will not count high school credits earned before high school completion. So that's like its own thing. But those are sort of edge cases from what I can tell, where there's a lot of overlap with community college transfer credits generally with dual enrollment is just in the generic associate degree programs of get your gen EDS out of the way, start taking courses, you'll figure it out later. And then as students accumulate more credits, maybe they didn't take the right gen EDS to get into the major at the four year. And so they're graduating with many excess credits. And that's the same sort of issue we see in community college generally. So we've been studying with places that do this better. First off, they're creating clearer major aligned transfer pathways we call structured transfer pathways to specific bachelor's degree fields. So you're taking the right math and the right gen eds and then they're using that to recruit and get students excited about dual enrollment and is this as an affordable route to a bachelor, and then using it to advise and help students build their individualized plan so they know those credits are going to transfer. So that's what we're seeing at places that are doing it well. And yes, there's an upfront investment to do that, but this is where we get back to the incentives. We see that there are Some real strong returns, both in terms of growing the field of college educated folks in communities, but also in terms of creating a future supply of students coming back to college.

So let's stay on the incentives for a moment and let's think about it from the student perspective as opposed to the districts and colleges themselves. Because this is a question I get all the time that I find fascinating. There's dual enrollment, there's AP, and then there's in some places IB international buck area programs of study. What are the financial incentives from the perspective of the students? Is one better than the other in terms of the work that you've done?

So I think it really depends on the student. And we kind of hope that they have a trusted adult in their high school that's helping them navigate all of this process. And oftentimes the student, they can get a dual enrollment course in math, but they can get the AP in English or PolSci and they're just sort of taking whatever they can get what's available. What we've heard from students though is that the AP to get the course, it really comes down to the test to get the credit. And we look nationally, you've got there's probably twice or maybe three times as many students taking AP courses as there are taking dual enrollment courses. But then there's fewer students who are then taking the test and then even fewer who are receiving a qualifying score on the test. Whereas if you look at dual enrollment, like course pass rates, they're typically around 90% or higher getting the credit for the college course. So you hear that from students, they're saying, look, the dual enrollment course, I get the credit if I do the work. It doesn't come down to a test. But I think what we hear from institutions is that they're trying to weave all of these together to help students get the best jumpstart on college. And you see really cool examples where colleges are trying to they're bringing in the AP and the dual enrollment, maybe some articulated credit, which is like prior learning assessment from the high school and packaging that together as the first step on your college degree. And I think that that's really where the field is moving. It's how do we work with all of these to give students more clarity, build on their purpose and get that jump start on a college degree.

John, I'm just curious to stay on that stat. You said 90% pass rate on the dual enrollment, a lot lower say on an AP exams. Right. Is that a good sign or is that something we should be Worried about does that mean we're passing students who maybe haven't mastered the learning and maybe we should be asking about the rigor of these classes. How do we think about that as good, bad, maybe a mixed bag?

I think we want students to be passing dual enrollment courses. So we want to broaden these courses, make them available, but then maintain the high quality of college instruction. But the key is to up the supports and provide additional supports in and outside the classroom to get more students in, but to get more students through. There's a field of folks working on this. There's an organization that accredits these dual enrollment programs, focusing on the quality and supports national alliance for Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, or nacep. So there's a whole field around ensuring a quality standard for dual enrollment courses. But ultimately I think we want high dual enrollment pass rates and we want to put more investments in to ensure that they maintain being so high as we broaden who can get into these courses.

So let's stay on that question, John, because you've done a lot of thinking about the quality and how to make sure that these are good experiences. What do we know from the research? You've built a framework around this. Walk us through that.

Sure. So over the past five or seven years, we've been studying in community colleges this guided pathways framework for whole institution student success reform. At the same time, community colleges are seeing so many more high school dual enrollment students. And so we wanted to see what did it look like when community colleges were extending this guided pathways student success reform to their high school offerings, which traditionally have been kind of this random act model or programs of privilege where colleges are offering dual enrollment almost in response to communities that are asking, and it's not very intentional in terms of who's getting access and what they're getting access to. We did some fieldwork. We visited places that had stronger outcomes, community colleges and their K12 partners for broadening access to black and Latino and low income students that had been implementing these guided pathways reforms. We learned about this dual enrollment equity pathways framework or DEEP framework that has four key components like the specialized outreach to communities that are underrepresented with extra supports to get into dual enrollment. Aligning the dual enrollment course offerings to college degree programs and bachelor's degree and transfer pathways in fields of interest to the communities and students, providing advising to help students explore their options and build a college degree plan and then, you know, ensuring that the instructional quality that these courses were very well taught. But there was a lot of supports to ensure that Students who are just taking their first college course were getting that transition into what it means to be a college student. This is what we've been studying, what it looks like when these programs are implemented. Well, just to come back to the incentives piece, that's not the conventional practice to take this deep approach because you're having to dedicate additional staff, time release faculty. But we do see strong incentives to take this approach, both in terms of what's right for students and communities, but also what can help build back enrollments for colleges and to mention the high school perspective for a while, especially in open choice environments where students and families are voting with their feet and going to different high schools or districts. We hear from high school principals that having a strong dual enrollment program that is free college or sort of, that start on a college pathway, but also that's aligned to a degree in a field of interest, that's a real feather in the cap that, that they love talking about with families and students in their community.

So as you just mentioned, these dual enrollment programs are scaling, they're reaching students who historically haven't had access to them. How do we make sure that the quality or accountability stays high? Right. You mentioned the accrediting association, which is one approach. Should we be looking at outcome based measures? What's the right way to be thinking about quality control as this grows and grows?

Well, I think we need a lot better data in the space. We're sort of in terms of metrics for student success. We've gotten there with the post secondary to some extent nationally. But when you're bridging K12 and post secondary data systems, I think there's even more of a need for clearer metrics around. Let's track access. Who's getting access or not? But then like you said, quality or outcomes, what's happening after high school for these students and what are their college outcomes? And what are the sort of metrics that states and colleges and their school district partners can use? Yes, for accountability, but also for improvement. Like what are the sort of leading indicators, the KPIs, the metrics that we can be looking at. And that's really where our work, we're really trying to focus in on that, providing better data and using it to plan improvements around these broad ideas of practice, like this dual enrollment equity pathways framework.

And John, I think I'll just mention on that that being sitting inside admissions offices that we're trying to evaluate dual enrollment from all over place as well as AP and ib. You know, dual enrollment would always fall to the bottom because there was just no sense of the quality of these things. So I think that's really important.

Yeah.

John Fink, thank you so much for joining us to really help walk us through I think this this increasingly big piece of of higher education and education in general that a lot of people just don't understand. So thank you so much.

Thank you. Foreign.

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so welcome back to Future youe after that very insightful conversation with John Fink, who walked us through a bevy of research on dual enrollment. And so Michael, I'm just curious if he changed your mind at all because I know you came into this interview pretty skeptical of dual enrollment.

Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. And obviously listeners have heard that skepticism over this past season, but I think it did change my mind. Not fully, but at least in one of my big concerns. And I left not just this conversation with John, but frankly also all the reading and prep we did for this conversation feeling like this is less a bad deal for students than I had feared up front, Jeff and I should clarify, not that I thought it was a bad deal per se, but I thought it might be a misleading one for many, particularly as the practice has expanded beyond serving more affluent students into less affluent ones that are maybe first gen in college, that maybe don't have the social capital to navigate college and so forth and understand frankly the risks in transferring credit and the like. And and I guess I leave feeling like yes, if the high schools are intentional about this process of offering these courses as John described, and if they follow his framework, then that probably means students are going to be taking gen Ed courses and those gen ed courses are going to help them get college credits and that's going to help them out. And it's okay, in other words, if it doesn't transfer and count for an eventual major because it's going to get them through the Gen Ed requirements quicker and that could at least save them money and time. And that's a good, good thing, I think. What about you, Jeff? You've also been no stranger to voice your suspicions about dual enrollment. So, and you mentioned up front in the conversation that when you saw these courses being evaluated during the reporting for your book that some college admissions officers looked dimly on them, especially when they compared them to AP or IB courses.

Yes, it's true that they don't see them in the same light as AP&IB in terms of something that's tied to an established curriculum. Sure, there's unevenness in both AP and ib, but perhaps there's just less of it. Now, coming off that interview with John, there are two issues and questions with dual enrollment that I still have or that I think warrant further discussion. And for this I want to kind of zoom in on Ohio to kind of illustrate it. First, I was talking recently with a high school counselor in Ohio who told me that dual enrollment at a school has just taken off in recent years for several reasons. First, they are required to weigh the courses, dual enrollment courses, the same as ap. And when everyone is trying to game the GPA system to get a good number for their college application, dual enrollment courses are seen as easier than AP courses. Second, if they take several dual enrollment courses, which in Ohio are called College Credit plus, and this is, by the way, another issue and how we don't even have a similar name for these nationwide, they can still be eligible for high school sports even if they're not taking a lot of high school courses, for example. And at this school, they don't take dual enrollment courses in the school building. They are either on a college campus, they're online, or they're hybrid. So it creates a lot of flexibility and freedom for students, he told me. And as a result, some of their AP courses at this high school are on life support because there's just not enough students coming in during the school day to take the regular high school courses. It's as he described and as we described it with John, it's kind of a wild west. You have some students in school some days, some students out of school other days. And particularly for athletes, it gives them a lot of flexibility to practice and train and so forth. Third, I asked him so okay, so maybe this is all worth it because they're saving on college. And what he told me is that his anecdotal evidence and talking to students who have graduated from that high school and now gone on to college, that, yes, they're taking maybe fewer courses within a specific semester. Maybe they're, maybe they're only taking 12 or 15, maybe they're not taking 18. And dual enrollment helped in that way to reduce their course load in any given semester, but they're still going for four years or maybe even four and a half or five years. So it hasn't reduced the overall length of their program, but maybe it eased up specific semesters. Finally, what I thought was interesting is if you don't pass the dual enrollment course, you're charged for it. So now parents are getting these bills and so often they don't know what they're getting into that their students are taking, their kids are taking all these dual enrollment courses and they may end up being charged for some of them because they're not passing them. So that's the perspective of this Ohio counselor who told me what was interesting is that college officials who come to the high schools are now pushing dual enrollment courses because their bosses are telling them. And why is that? Because they want enrollment. And this is the second thing that I wanted to bring up from Ohio because the state auditor recently found that only 16 of the 31 public institutions in the state were turning a profit on these courses when you factored in other things like indirect and, and as well as direct support costs, such as academic advising, admission support. So on the surface, these schools might think they're making money, and they are if just look at the instructional costs. But if you start to wrap in all the other costs that are required because of dual enrollment courses, at least according to this Ohio audit, they're actually losing money on that. And so just one final thought, Michael, because I just, because I know you're interested in the rigor piece of this. When I was talking to the counselor, he had a teacher in the room also, and her daughter was taking a dual enrollment course and this teacher said, who teaches ap, said it couldn't hold a candle to the AP course. And I think that's your, your point, right? That even if these courses seem to be working and getting more students college credit in high school and getting them to college, you're still worried about their rigor at the end of the day.

Yeah, you nailed it, Jeff. And it's interesting, like, hearing you go through that because you're, you're the first two points from the college or from the counselor in Ohio. Like, you know, more flexible schedules. It's a more fluid. Right. They have more choice. They can do athletics. Like, that doesn't bother me. And the fact that they can take maybe fewer classes and do better and make sure that they get through college, that sort of explains the mystifying thing that John said where they're graduating at the same length as other students. So those don't necessarily strike me as bad things, I guess. But the bigger concern I have is where you just landed. And I worry considerably that these experiences, primarily when they're taught by a high school teacher, I should say I worry that they don't have the rigor that you would expect in a true college course. Or maybe more to the point that there's a good objective bar to certify learning. So John mentioned 90% passage rates. And if you compare that to the AP, they're like. And I'm not sure about this, But I think AP English language and comp. That's like a 56% get a 3 or above, which I think would be passing Jeff or AP Bio, I think is like 64% get a 3 or above. So that's considerably lower. And on the one hand, I understand why John would say, but that's a good thing. We want students succeeding. I totally agree. I want 100% of students succeeding. But I guess I have considerable questions about what succeeding means here from the perspective of are they really learning and mastering the material? And it reminds me a lot of the online credit recovery conversations that we were having in high schools literally a little over a decade ago. And I still remember a high school educator, and we were in one of these rooms where we were talking about some of these opportunities for innovation, and she turned at me and said, ah, now I get it. Online credit recovery, the job to be done. And she's using my language isn't about the learning. It's just to make sure that they get the high school diploma. And, like, I get that sentiment in the short term, but, man, Jeff, I really worry about the slippery slope to becoming a diploma millimeter and just awarding credentials without anything behind them. It seems very, very slippery to me. And in the credit recovery space, as you know, we started seeing students master whole courses with, like two hours of work. Well, why? Because they just wanted to get the diploma. And I think here this is a worry, right as we start to talk about dual enrollment. And it's not me that's going to start to pull away the value of the credential by the way, it's employers. They're going to ask bigger and bigger questions about the college degree. What does it really signify? They're already asking that. Colleges are also going to ask bigger questions because they already don't believe, given grade inflation, what a lot of the grades and pass rates on report cards actually mean. So I think that's my question is what does a 90% passage rate of a dual enrollment course actually signify? On the one hand, we have research saying more likely to matriculate and graduate. That's comforting. On the other hand, as the practice extends and if some schools are treating this as profit centers, I really worry about where it goes. And I think you're hearing that, Jeff, in the students who say, oh, let's take the easier course, right? Let's not take the more rigorous one. And I guess last thought on this, and I don't know if you agree here, but I think you could also read in John's point that passage of a course should not come down to just one high stakes test as it does in ap. I totally agree with that. And the AP isn't perfect, right? But on the other hand, I love that there's an objective measurement of mastery that's not from your teacher. And I think that there are other ways to do that for dual enrollment that don't boil down to one test. It could be an assessment of a portfolio of work plus some papers or projects or something, but something objective, please. And I guess that's the bigger thing here. Jeff it's not so much that I'm annoyed at this. I'm disappointed that we're missing a bigger opportunity to perhaps move to mastery learning. Jeff?

Yeah, Michael, A critical point on assessment there and mastery learning, of course. There's two other quick thoughts I have on this. I'm a little concerned about how they're going to count after high school. They're sold often. Dual enrollment courses are sold often as an alternative to AP and ib. And it seems that we may have a whole generation of students and parents, frankly, who are going to be disappointed in what they get from some colleges for these courses. So I just think this brings up a whole nother issue around credit transfer in higher ed and that many of these courses might not count the way that parents and students expect them. And so I think that we just need a lot more transparency about what you're going to get for these dual enrollment courses. And by the way that be upfront, especially depending on where you're going to go to college, if I'm going to go to an in state public or an in state community college. Or could you give me some guidance on the private college side too? Because most of these students might be taking these courses before they really decide where they're going to go and thus they don't really know how they're going to count. And Michael, we've talked a lot about the quality of the courses, but not the financing side of these in community colleges, as we know are struggling in many states already. Not only are they pushing these courses, as we heard from that counselor in Ohio, to make up for a drop in enrollment of their traditional students, but as we stated earlier, they're not getting the full amount of money for these courses, so it just puts them in a deeper hole. So they're getting the enrollment, they're getting the bodies in a seat, but they're not necessarily getting every dollar that they really need. And it seems kind of surprising to me that they're losing money on the students, but yet they want more of them. Right. And so at the end of the day, it reminds me of our conversation earlier this season in Idah about what is the mission and role of community colleges now. They just seem to be serving anyone and everyone, including these high school students now for dual enrollment.

Yeah.

And look, this is the confusing part of it, all right. I think, you know, maybe some of these community colleges, they see it as lead gen. Right. It's a cheaper form of getting students. And of course, as you pointed out, some of them are making money and some of them, let's be honest, maybe they don't even realize that they're losing money because it's not their faculty actually teaching the class in most cases. And as you've pointed out millions of times, Jeff. Right. Most colleges have no idea what a given major even costs them on their side. Right. So they just might not have a firm grasp of some of these numbers. But I think the other thing is there's real policy pressure behind this right now. And for the public institutions, community colleges, I think they're going to go along with it because it's keeping their overall enrollment numbers afloat. And maybe, Jeff, that's more important than anything else.

Yeah. I feel like there is this public pressure, as you're saying, and I heard that from this counselor in Virginia, both from the state, from the school district and from parents. But I feel like we're doing it again. We're kind of building the plane as we fly it. Right. I think we brought up a lot of good questions that Maybe we'll continue to talk about this on a future episode. Like who teaches these courses and where? This lack of national standards, what we even call them, how they're counted in college. There's just so many questions. I think even after this great conversation with John Fink and our kind of take on it, I just feel like if we are going to push this at the state level or at the district level, it seems like we need to have a larger and longer discussion on what is the goal. What is the ultimate goal here for students? Is it about saving money in college? Is it about finishing college early, which clearly they're not? Is it about giving them more flexibility and more optionality in high school, which I like. Like, you don't seem that bothered by students kind of coming and going out of high school. I think that high school there is a community. It's a little bit different than a college campus. I think that there is a community in high school and that was one of the things we were missing during COVID when students were learning from home. So the way the. This counselor in Ohio described it to me, you know, some days this many students would be in high school, the next day, maybe a quarter of that amount would be out, right?

And well, if just, just stay on that for a second. I. On the one hand, like, I think high school would be more interesting if it's more fluid and I get the downside. On the other hand, like, think about chronic absenteeism and trying to figure out who's legitimately absent, right? No wonder they're having trouble if, like, half the students maybe aren't even supposed to be there. How would you know? I think that's part of your point too.

And I think it's also like they have a curriculum that they want to serve up and if students aren't there to kind of take advantage of it, how do they plan for that curriculum from year to year? Michael, I'm so glad that we finally did this episode and that's all we have time for. Today on Future you again. Continue to follow us on various social channels as well as my newsletter and Michael's newsletter. Sign up for it to hear more about Future youe. Please rate us wherever you listen to podcasts as well as subscribe to us and make comments there and and we will see you next time on Future youe.