The dual-credit risk in high schools

Enter dual-credit programs

There is some early research that suggests that “when done well” it can have positive outcomes for students. The rub is the phrase “when done well.”

For students who take concurrent college courses under the belief that those credits will help them graduate faster, they may have a rude awakening. That’s because first-time students who transfer lose 43% of their credits on average. According to the General Accounting Office, “the average credits lost during transfer is equivalent to about four courses, which is almost one semester of full-time enrollment.” The transferring of credits is the toughest, it seems, for community college students.

Worse still, in many high schools, the neighboring community college trains the high school teachers to deliver the community college course. So students aren’t actually taking a college course taught by a college professor with other college students. Is the resulting teaching and learning experience the same as a college course? Who knows, but just as many colleges discount Advanced Placement classes, I have my doubts.

In the absence of external objective measures of performance that help us move to competency-based—or mastery-based—learning that the Carnegie Foundation and ETS are working on, there are other, simpler ways forward in the interim.

Take a real college course for starters. Rather than settle for a college course taught in high school, students can now take the actual college course itself online.

Acadeum—an enrollment platform that allows over several hundred colleges and universities to share their courses online—started offering dual-enrollment opportunities two years ago. High school students in these courses are taking the actual college course, with an actual faculty member, and sometimes with other college students.

What’s more, because over 20 different institutions offer over 3,000 courses to high school students on the platform, students theoretically can take a course from an institution more likely to align with their college and career goals to increase the odds of successful credit transfer. To date, nearly 1,000 high school students have taken advantage of one of these options.

Similarly, Arizona State University Prep Digital—an accredited K–12 online high school where I’m an advisor—offers students in its partner high schools the opportunity to take actual college classes from ASU. And because ASU is a top research institution, credits have a better chance of transferring.

Dual-credit programs in high school are surely well-intentioned. But because there aren’t clear quality standards in place for what they mean, high schools and states that push them risk selling their students a bill of credits that likely lack value. It may end up costing students a whole lot of money they didn’t plan on spending when they enroll in college.