Are Dual Enrollment Courses an Advantage?
By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project
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 11th 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 12th 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 11th or 12th 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 8th-10th 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 9th 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.
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