David Bressoud's Launchings from the CUPM Curriculum Guide

Dual enrollment programs are arrangements between a local college and high school whereby students enrolled in certain classes receive both high school and college credit. For the purposes of this article, the term will be used exclusively for classes that are taken at the high school and receive dual credit. Though they have existed for a long time, dual enrollment programs have taken off in the past decade as high schools and colleges have come to see them as mutually beneficial. In fact, they seem to be a win for everyone: Colleges like them because even at reduced tuition, they are a source of additional revenue and a way of increasing enrollment numbers at very low cost. High schools like them because of the prestige of offering college-credit courses. Students like them because they eliminate the need to take a high stakes national test, such as the AP Calculus exam, in order to earn credit, and they look good on a transcript when applying to college. Parents like them because they can shorten the number of years their child will be in college, and thus the number of tuition payments.

This column looks at three aspects of this issue: data from the CBMS Survey, Fall 2005, an example from Nassau Community College of what it takes to build a good dual enrollment program, and the Early College High School Initiative.

A small number of students take statistics under dual enrollment, but most of the dual enrollment courses in mathematics are either college algebra/precalculus or calculus I. Just offering college algebra/precalculus as a college-credit course taught in a high school is problematic. Many colleges, Macalester among them, no longer consider these to be college-level courses. Even colleges and universities that do offer college credit for these courses usually treat them as preliminary to the mathematics required for mathematically intensive majors. If these courses really are high school mathematics, what does it mean to offer college credit for them when they are taken in high school?

To get an idea of the annual numbers, the CBMS survey counted the number of students in dual enrollment programs in both spring and fall terms of 2005 [1]. There were 63,986 students studying college algebra/precalculus, 33,436 studying calculus I. Both 2-year and 4-year colleges are involved in awarding dual enrollment credit: 22% of the students in college algebra/precalculus and 42% of those in calculus I received their credit from a 4-year college. Occasionally, these courses are taught by college faculty, but that is the exception. Only 4% of the courses affiliated with 4-year colleges and 12% of those affiliated with 2-year colleges are taught by college faculty. Even the label “college faculty” can be problematic because there are cases where high school teachers are designated as faculty of the college.

College departments were asked to self-report on whether they maintained control over four aspects of these programs: selection of textbook, syllabus, final exam, and choice of instructor. The table below (taken from [1]) shows the results.

College control over	4-year colleges			2-year colleges
College control over	never	sometimes	always	never	sometimes	always
Textbook	41%	15%	44%	14%	12%	74%
Syllabus	2%	6%	92%	4%	7%	89%
Final Exam	40%	30%	30%	36%	28%	37%
Instructor	32%	20%	48%	35%	13%	52%

I find it very disturbing that the most effective means of ensuring quality, control over the final examination and the choice of instructor, so seldom receive the needed supervision.

This lack of accountability can lead to serious problems for both the students and the colleges at which they are accepted. While there are many excellent high school teachers capable of teaching these courses as well as or better than the instruction at college, and while even the term “college-level” is problematic because of the great disparity among colleges in how such courses are taught, the goal of any dual enrollment course is that students who successfully complete it are at least as well prepared for the next course in the sequence as those who have taken it at the college from which credit is given. Without close oversight and supervision, there is danger that credit might be given even when the level of preparation is below that required for the next course.

There are dual enrollment programs that do maintain the control that is needed. Nassau Community College (NCC) on Long Island, New York, is one that is doing a good job [2]. The pieces that go into their program include

I have talked with Phil Cheifetz at NCC about this program, and he has emphasized that this last point is critical to ensuring that these students are held to appropriate standards.

Phil also alerted me to the fact that there now is an accreditation agency for dual enrollment programs, the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (NACEP) [3]. For those readers who know more about this organization, I would be very interested in your assessment of its usefulness. What impresses me most about NACEP is that its accreditation is accompanied by a rating system that describes the degree of control along several different dimensions. It appears that NACEP accreditation may be a useful tool to help colleges decide when dual enrollment credit should be accepted.

In learning about dual enrollment programs, I have also been alerted to a movement that has the potential to greatly impact the educational system as we know it. The Early College High School Initiative is a nation-wide collection of programs that award college credit for courses taken while in high school and is targeted specifically at “low-income youth, first-generation college goers, English language learners, students of color, and other young people underrepresented in higher education.”[4] It is committed to instruction that is “rigorous, relevant, and relationship-based” (its 3R’s). Alarmingly, one of its primary goals is to allow these students to earn up to two full years of college credit while still in high school. Spearheaded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Ford Foundation, and The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, it is a serious undertaking that is already operating in 130 schools, involving over 16,000 students. The goal by 2012 is 239 schools and 96,400 students.

Unlike the dual enrollment programs described above, most of the college-level classes, 58% of all programs, are taught on college campuses, while another 22% are in special facilities devoted to ECHS. For the most part, the courses that carry college credit are taught by college faculty (again, this can be an ambiguous designation), but usually to classes made up entirely of high school students. Of eight ECHS programs that were studied in detail in 2006, five teach at least some of the college-credit courses in classes that enroll both college and ECHS students, but only one of the programs teaches all of its college-credit courses in this manner. [5, p. 33] This makes a difference. In an independent study of this program undertaken during 2004–05, “interviews revealed that college instructors were more likely to maintain their usual standards if ECHS students were enrolled alongside other college students, rather than comprising the entire class.” [5, p. 35] The program is new enough that as yet there are no reliable statistics on its effectiveness at getting at-risk students into and through college.

What I see as the primary goal of this initiative: to introduce rigorous, college-level material to at-risk students, giving them a sense of what college is like and what it will take to succeed while providing an environment that helps them to succeed, is very worthy. I do worry about the promise of being able to complete two years of college-level courses while in high school. Students who successfully complete this program and arrive at college with the intention of graduating in only two more years will find themselves shut out of any mathematically intensive major. Few students, even among the most talented and accelerated, arrive at college with the three semesters of calculus and the semester of linear algebra required before taking junior/senior level courses in mathematics, physics, or chemistry.

The independent report does suggest backing off from the promise of two years of college credit earned while in high school as a “core principle” and replacing it with a commitment to compress the time needed to complete a post-secondary degree [5, p. 93]. Even that commitment may make it more difficult for these students to enter mathematically intensive fields.

This initiative is already encountering some problems in maintaining rigor. Among the findings in the independent evaluation was that “Observed ECHS high school classes showed evidence of the 3R’s [rigorous, relevant, and relationship-based], although rigorous instruction was elusive, especially in mathematics classes.” [5, p. 91] I am concerned about what will happen to the expectations for achievement levels as this initiative expands and attracts imitators who sell their program as a way of cutting college costs.

Many forces have combined to drive both dual enrollment and the ECHS promise of a high school diploma that comes with an associate’s degree attached. High college tuition is one of them. Until now, demand for college degrees has seemed perfectly inelastic; people will pay whatever colleges charge. As everyone knows, that cannot be true. People are not going to stop going to college, but they may well seek perverse and counter-productive routes to its completion. For those of us who worry about the low number of students going into mathematically intensive majors, this should be a matter of concern.

[5] American Institute for Research and SRI International. Evaluation of the Early High School Initiative. Prepared for The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 2007. www.earlycolleges.org/publications.html

Launchings from the CUPM Curriculum Guide: The Dangers of Dual Enrollment

Launchings from the CUPM Curriculum Guide:
The Dangers of Dual Enrollment