Double-Benefit Education?

 Are Dual Enrollment Courses an Advantage?

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Dual enrollment courses allow high school students to take college classes and earn credits that count towards both a high school diploma and a college degree. Parents see this as a chance to get started on a college education while finishing high school. Many States offer dual enrollment in community colleges at a reduced cost or even free. Many colleges offer dual enrollment as an enticement to transition those high school students quickly and easily into full-time students once they graduate. What’s not to like?

Quality of Education

All too often, students are asked to abandon upper-level—truly college-preparatory—courses like advanced Greek, Latin, Shakespeare, AP classes, college composition, and philosophy because they have the opportunity to enroll in dual enrollment courses instead. We see a lot of our best and brightest at The Lukeion Project zipped away at just the time when they are really embracing their favorite materials.  Universally there’s a sense of pride: I’m taking college classes though I just started 11^th grade! On the flip side, we sometimes hear back from students expressing regrets. Dual enrollment wasn’t exactly the positive experience they had hoped for but why? What do students say?

Especially for our home educated or privately schooled students, jumping into a community college English class or a self-paced dual enrollment from their local university can be a disappointment. Over the course of a 30+ year teaching career, I’ve had dozens of students say they wished they had stuck with classes they loved instead of grabbing classes that let them finish basic college requirements. Pace and curriculum in a lot of dual enrollment classes are typically geared at tackling the basics, something academically minded kids already covered. Taking classes they loved and passing CLEP exams to finish basics would have made better sense for most.

There’s no denying that a head start on college credits is a nice cash savings but what are the main issues with jumping into community college or dual-enrollment classes in the final years of high school?

A Check Box Education is Not That Exciting

Higher education is diminishing in almost every way. In five years, most of our colleges will be closed or transformed for a variety of reasons that may be unavoidable, and which can’t be covered here in so short a blog. Most relevant is the fact that higher education, formerly an opportunity to celebrate the maturation of our best and brightest as they are fostered by experts in their chosen fields, is now a check list to be completed at any cost using any available method. What was once an educational system of professionals training the next generation of field professionals has become a checklist to obtain quick affordable credentials.

How is credentialism contributing to the collapse of higher education? As credentials, diplomas, or certificates have first priority over all other factors, so too has the search for ways to offer those credentials as expeditiously and as cheaply as possible. Fast, economical, streamlined, AI-dependent “training programs” (compared to semester classes with faculty, papers, exams, and presentations) feels like a double win. Students can save money by working more (or less) quickly and remotely while colleges need not hire more faculty. College programs are becoming a race to get certified.

College faculty numbers are shrinking. College hiring has stopped in many fields while remaining faculty are asked to focus on more remedial classes. A faculty educator’s years of experience and the benefits of making career connections with peers in one’s professional network are going out of style when students can zoom through online training apps and asynchronous learning assignments.

Why not get that piece of paper quicker than ever without the bother of ever entering a classroom or working with faculty personally? Spend a few hours each night and weekends to read “executive summaries” followed by a fast quiz and then you are done. It is no mystery that more students prefer this approach.

Larger universities offer thousands of resident degree options, but this is changing. They now are forced to devise faster ways to “credential” a sea of non-resident asynchronous students as quickly as possible. Classroom learning will all but disappear except for a diminishing handful of programs that require training in specific physical skills.

As an ever faster, easier, cheaper credential system spreads (demolishing the need for four-year degrees), businesses will (and are) rejecting credentials from their new hires. Companies are becoming less interested in certification earned, but innate qualities demonstrated. Is the person articulate? Diligent? Determined and self-starting? Can they think and write? Why not select for personality and privately train the ideal employee?   

Completing a college degree has gone from a badge of honor for those with special academic interests to a certification process that nearly everyone completes, regardless of life goals, talents, or interests. Soon, college will be a place nobody attends. Diplomas and certifications are getting faster, cheaper, and soon less necessary. Employers can use the same cheaply wrought AI education that four-year degree institutions are zealously developing. College expenses will go from astronomically high to zero as employers will take over the job. Corporations can better build training systems for employees that suit their objectives. Universities—what few remain—will return to nurturing only very specific academic pursuits and the cycle will have come full circle.       

Cost to Benefit Analysis Explains the Push for Dual Enrollment

One can still find a few programs that offer excellent in-person education in comprehensive classes that offer simultaneous high school and college credit. They aren’t all gone but they are rare. At the beginning (way back in the ‘80s), academically talented 12^th grade students could get a head start on college level material and forgo the chore of repeating the same material at college prices. Now, material that was easily aligned as average 11^th or 12^th grade material –deemed too pedestrian for gifted, talented, or ambitious kids—is offered as the curriculum for dual enrollment classes. Remedial level lessons—what was formerly 8^th-10^th grade material—remains the core of typical in-class high school courses.

Students actually wanting to work at “college level” in certain subjects are still having to wait to take those classes in college. Dual enrollment isn’t really working at the college level so much as it is now working where high school used to be only 6 or 7 years ago.    

College Preparatory?

High school students are given a wide range of options as they finish their high school years today. If they attend a public high school, they are pressured to move to dual enrollment to make room in funding for the ever-growing need for remedial seats. Students who were once encouraged to take a couple of AP classes to demonstrate promising academic abilities are being tasked with filling their schedules with every imaginable AP class starting in 9^th grade. In an effort to accommodate the growing interest in AP classes and the cash that flows from that interest, exams are being adjusted down in complexity. More passing scores means more participants next year! Colleges, also not excited about losing out on the cash-flow from so many AP class credits, are accepting such credits as a way to attract ambitious students but then adjust degree requirements. AP classes are often not quite college level anymore, per se.

Things to Think About

It is not easy to pass up dual enrollment classes with two-for-the-price-of-one outcomes. Who wouldn’t want to be half-finished with college before even beginning? The trouble is that human beings, as usual, are in charge of this societal shift. Opportunities to work ahead once served students well intellectually and economically, but all outcomes are not equal. What was once advertised as a great way for college-bound kids to get ahead may not actually perform as advertised anymore. Students who do have an educational program they enjoy and find fulfilling may not see promised gains if they jump onto the credential conveyor belt. Financial and certification incentives sound great but, we find in practice, they are rapidly diluting the quality and intensity of the education at both the high school and college levels.    

A Challenging Education

Why Rigor?

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project 

Recently I was reading a discussion posted to a Classical education group. The OP was a parent of a student in 7^th grade trying to frame a good educational plan for her child while not over-stressing him. Her question was simple yet complex: Why is it important to provide a rigorous education for one’s child? What is “rigor”?

Rigor is too often defined as simply “challenging” (lots of AP classes) or maybe just college preparatory. A rigorous education is more than just being academically busy, though many programs and students treat it that way. I see three main components that help define a rigorous education for any student.

1. Thorough

Education is a luxury. Over a lifetime we fortunate few will enjoy a window of opportunity to focus specifically on our own education. While our earliest years should feel like play, as we mature in our education, we must gradually learn that education is a thing we do for ourselves rather than being a thing done to us in the form of a lengthy check list of chores before certificates of completion are offered.

Statistically, most do not mature much beyond “consuming” education primarily by completing check lists and seeking certifications with few distinctions or preferences for the quality or intensity of each part, provided each required category is completed. Even students who have limited interest in an academic future will finish half their high school courses as dual enrollment to save “time and money” at the college level. Once at college they’ll often find those dual enrollment classes weren’t much of a challenge after all and credits need to be repeated.   

A rigorous education is one that exceeds base levels and goes beyond check boxes. Students read the whole piece of literature, not just the summary. Learners master a topic at level rather than just cursorily “cover” the topic workbook style for a given period. They might “take” French for the expected two years in a check-list model or, with rigor, they might learn enough that they can navigate and converse in the language with relative ease. Both approaches take two years, only one matters in the long run.

A rigorous education is thorough enough that each level is a proper foundation for the next for as long as the learner chooses. If she comes to completely understand the mechanics of English in middle school, she can stand on that foundation to master even more interesting things in writing or foreign languages in subsequent years and eventually enjoy a wide variety of options professionally in the future as a writer, speaker, journalist, or interpreter.

The check-box education may result in the same certification of completion in the same number of years as a rigorous education. Only rigor builds a foundation to stand on and as you build and climb to even higher goals. If you have the choice between a heart surgeon who was at the top percentile of her exclusive cohort or one who enjoyed a program that allowed 100% to pass with minimal effort, you wouldn’t hesitate to pick the first one as you grow to appreciate rigor in education.      

2. Challenging

A rigorous education must always push a student to go just beyond his current skill levels, whatever those levels might be. This is why a student doesn’t need to be academically gifted, per se, to deeply profit from a rigorous education to the same degree that an academically gifted student will. The goal is to constantly challenge yourself and perpetually try things that are just beyond your reach. If you plant a sapling tree but leave it tethered, supported, propped, and protected, it never becomes robust enough to weather storms. Challenging yourself in your own education helps you weather the storms to come as they certainly will.

There is no real distinction in the outcome of an unchallenged gifted student and a well challenged average student who braved a rigorous education.  

Real challenges in education even at the college level are now rare. Public education is not designed for rigor. Private education is only a little better. In both approaches, education is diluted to increase the commodity of students who check their boxes and get their papers. Profound topics that once challenged human minds for centuries are now efficiently reduced to short summaries followed by multiple-choice questions in a pass-fail course with unlimited tries. Challenging doesn’t “pay” anymore for most schools.

Unusually, rigor works at The Lukeion Project because students who achieve mastery at a lower level are ready to climb to our next steps. We don’t list our classes as “9^th grade English” because a student must go back to basics or even surge forward to the levels that challenge them so they can build up.

3. Comprehensive

A rigorous education doesn’t decide a student’s path prematurely. A student with a strong interest in dinosaurs or chess at age 10 is still led through a robust selection of literature, art, music, writing, philosophy, public speaking, and foreign language along with more typical STEM topics and even basics in the garden, kitchen, and shop. We need well-rounded electricians, astrophysicists, and journalists, please.

Why is Rigor Important?

In terms of overall life satisfaction, being genuinely challenged by a subject and then enjoying a sense of achievement by overcoming that trial is a true boost to ego and self. Nobody looks back on a check box education as being intrinsically rewarding. Ever hear a grandparent entertain the family with harrowing tales of doing the bare minimum or going through the motions or just staying busy until time expires? A big part of feeling confidence is the assurance that, having overcome challenges before, we can overcome them again.

A person gains the confidence to continue to bigger challenges when she has a history of prior success over actual challenges. In a world of participation trophies and easy wins, we have a generation of deeply depressed young people. They’ve not overcome anything difficult before and, as adults, don’t know how... and are terrified they can’t.  

Every student’s rigorous education should, ideally, be crafted for her and well-suited to him. Rigor means that the next level up should be difficult to reach without strong effort. Top grades should not be granted to anybody that merely followed the instructions but no more. There’s a level above that! Rigor means that excellence—overcoming the challenge fully—is not a check list but a genuine victory.