Tag: earn

  • As More High Schoolers Earn College Credit, Some Miss Out – The 74

    As More High Schoolers Earn College Credit, Some Miss Out – The 74


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    This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

    Students tap on their keyboards as a professor lectures at the front of the room. It looks like any other college course, except that it’s taking place at a high school. This year, more than 150,000 California teens are earning college credit in dual enrollment courses.

    Dual enrollment offers high schoolers the chance to attend community college, typically for free, often without having to leave their campuses. By helping students tackle the college academic experience, the programs increase the likelihood that students attend college after graduating high school.

    About 80% of California’s dual enrolled high school students go on to a community college or university, compared to 66% of California 12th grade students in general, the Public Policy Institute of California found. More than a third of California’s dual enrolled students go on to attend the same community college they attended while in high school after they graduate, according to the Community College Research Center.

    Many college and high school administrators have pushed to increase students’ college attainment rates, and the state has invested more than $700 million in dual enrollment, leading to a significant expansion. The number of students in these courses tripled between spring 2015 and spring 2024, according to state data. The Public Policy Institute of California found that about 30% of California’s high school graduating class of 2024 took at least one dual enrollment course.

    The growth of high schoolers is a bright spot in overall student totals at the state’s community colleges, which have struggled to fully rebound after enrollment tanked during the pandemic. However, some community college faculty have pushed back against widespread dual enrollment due to concerns about academic rigor and working conditions for educators.

    Furthermore, data shows that some of California’s rural students, as well as males and students of color, don’t enroll in and complete these courses at the same rate as others. Some experts and administrators say they’re not just missing out on a couple of college credits, they’re not getting the same opportunities to envision themselves as future college students.

    “When high schoolers complete these courses, they are able to fulfill requirements that help them access associate degrees and bachelor’s degrees,” said Daniel Payares-Montoya, a PPIC research associate. “The students benefit, but so do the community colleges, because it helps them enroll more students.”

    Rural schools and colleges face dual enrollment hurdles 

    In Siskiyou County, at the northern tip of California, the only community college serves a sprawling region that covers mountains, forests and rural towns. Although the county has a population of just 43,000, it is the fifth largest county in California by area, meaning that often the hardest part of supporting dual enrolled students isn’t the actual teaching — it’s having the right technology and transportation to reach them in the first place.

    “The personal interaction is a challenge, because we have high schools that are two hours away,” said Kim Peacemaker, a counselor and dual enrollment coordinator at College of the Siskiyous. The college currently has about 230 dual enrolled high school students and about 2,390 students total, based on state data.

    Peacemaker said the college has worked to make dual enrollment accessible by allowing professors to meet virtually with students in their high school classrooms. However, she added that some students don’t have reliable internet access at home for homework or tutoring. In Siskiyou County, 13.7% of households don’t have broadband internet.

    On a sunny day on a community college campus, students walk along a concrete path flanked by rows of light poles and between more buildings. Two students are wearing bright tie-dyed shirts and holding coffee cups as they walk.
    Students walk through one of the main walkways onto Bakersfield College on June 14, 2023. (Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local)

    California’s rural colleges generally lag behind urban colleges in dual enrollment. Kern Community College District in the southern Central Valley and the Compton Community College District near Los Angeles had the two highest percentages of high school students in 2024, at 41%  and 36%  respectively, based on state data. In comparison, 9.7% of students at College of the Siskiyous are dual enrolled high schoolers, and this drops to about 5% in some other parts of the state.

    Sonya Christian, the chancellor of the California Community College system, previously led the Kern Community College District, spearheading its expansion of dual enrollment. Now, dual enrollment in the district is “one of the most successful models in the state,” Christian said in an emailed statement to CalMatters.

    “I prioritized dual enrollment because I saw it as a potential pathway to increase college-going rates, accelerate degree completion and provide students — especially those in rural and low-income communities — with early exposure to college-level coursework,” Christian said in the statement.

    For many high school students in the small city of Blythe, which sits along California’s border with Arizona, the only people they know with bachelor’s degrees are their teachers. That’s why Clint Cowden, the vice president of instruction and student services at Palo Verde College, said the exposure to college that dual enrollment provides these students can be transformative.

    “It’s really a win-win for the community,” Cowden said.

    A recent alumnus of Palo Verde College’s dual enrollment program, Manuel Milke earned his high school diploma and his associate degree simultaneously, while juggling varsity soccer and football. Now Milke, who is 19, is set to graduate in the fall from San Diego State with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology. Milke said he chose to attend San Diego State to stay close to his family in Blythe, and aspires to work as a physical therapist somewhere nearby.

    “Everyone should do dual enrollment,” said Milke. “It saved me time, it saved me money and it made me feel more prepared for college.”

    Student gaps remain in dual enrollment

    As a Latino male, Milke is in the minority for dual enrollment. Based on state data, Black and Latino students are both underrepresented in dual enrollment courses. In the spring 2024 semester, 41% of dual enrollment students were male, while 56% were female. According to Payares-Montoya, these gaps in access to dual enrollment can make it so Black, Latino and male students are less likely to see higher education as an option, compared to their dual enrolled peers.Range plot comparing dual enrollment students and high school students by gender (male, female) and race/ethnicity (Black, Latino, White). Male, Black and Latino students are underrepresented in dual enrollment.

    For Jesse Medrano, an 18-year-old senior at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District, dual enrollment has provided “a good outline of what college is like.” His high school first placed him in dual enrollment in ninth grade, and since then he has taken five classes, covering topics including economics and political science.

    “I didn’t have the drive to seek these courses out, so the fact that they put me in them set this standard for me, and now I’m meeting it,” said Medrano, who is Latino and plans to study accounting at Cal State Northridge. “I didn’t have the motivation, but now I do, and I’m able to succeed.”

    At Compton College more than a third of the current students are still in high school, according to state data. Latino and Black students comprise 75% and 9% of dual enrollees, respectively, which are significantly higher than state averages. Keith Curry, the college’s president, said that when students of color complete dual enrollment courses, this gets them comfortable with college academics and leads to better representation at colleges and universities.

    Some faculty push back against expansion

    Some community college faculty have raised concerns about the process by which dual enrollment partnerships are established, the level of readiness of high school students for college courses, and who teaches these classes. In many districts across the state, some dual enrollment courses are not taught by community college faculty, but by existing high school teachers who hold the credentials required to teach at a college level. In the Kern Community College District, about 60% of dual enrollment courses held on high school campuses are taught by high school teachers who meet the college qualifications, according to district spokesperson Norma Rojas.

    Tim Maxwell, an English professor at College of San Mateo, is a “conscientious objector” to California’s expansion of dual enrollment. Maxwell said he is concerned about what he sees as a focus to get as many students to graduate and earn college credits as quickly as possible, sacrificing college-level rigor and evaluation.

    “Completion is important, but our primary responsibility is for students to learn something along the way,” said Maxwell, who has taught community college courses for about 30 years.

    Maxwell has taught creative writing courses on his college campus with several dual enrolled students, one as young as 15 years old, and he said these students are “phenomenal.” But, he added, there’s a difference between a handful of proactive high schoolers going to a community college campus and a high school classroom that “switches to a college class during fifth period.” He said he is concerned about poor working conditions for professors, primarily adjunct faculty, who have to travel to high schools and teach without the proper background or support.

    “We need to resist this, and we need lawmakers who understand something about education and not just spreadsheets,” Maxwell said.

    Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, the president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, said dual enrollment is beneficial for students, but that she has “heard grumblings” about a need for faculty to have a more active role in setting standards and policies for dual enrollment.

    A person holding a skateboard walks by a white mission-style building surrounded by palm trees on a sunny and clear day.
    Students walk near Hepner Hall at San Diego State University in San Diego on Oct. 10, 2024. (Adriana Heldiz/CalMatters)

    While in high school in Blythe, Milke said his dual enrollment courses were generally easier than the courses he takes at San Diego State. But they still challenged him and prepared him for a college-level workload, he said.

    Lawmakers work to continue growth

    Several state laws have been enacted in the past decade to expand dual enrollment in California. In 2015, Assembly Bill 288 established the College and Career Access Pathways program, allowing community colleges and high schools to enter into dual enrollment partnerships. These institutions bring the courses to students, as opposed to those students having to seek them out. The state streamlined the pathways program with the passage of Assembly Bill 30 in 2019, allowing students to submit fewer forms to enroll. Assembly Bill 731, which is currently in committee, would, among other changes, increase the number of units that students in the program can take.

    Based on PPIC research, students in the College and Career Access Pathways program now account for about 37% of dual enrollees. This program has a higher percentage of underrepresented students compared to other dual enrollment programs, in part because it eliminates some of the restrictions that can make it hard for schools to offer broad and barrier-free dual enrollment.

    As dual enrollment continues to expand, it increases costs to California beyond the more than $700 million that the state has already invested. That’s because both community colleges and high school districts are typically both able to receive state funding for dual enrolled students, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

    According to the statement from Christian, state leaders are working to increase dual enrollment access by expanding partnerships between high schools and colleges.

    “My vision is to make dual enrollment a standard opportunity for all California students, not just an option for a select few, increasing equitable access to higher education and workforce-aligned learning,” Christian said in the statement.

    Alana Althaus-Cressman, who runs the dual enrollment program at Golden Eagle Charter School, a K-12 school in Siskiyou County, markets the program to all students, not just those who already have a record of high achievement. She studied dual enrollment access for rural students for her graduate school dissertation at Sacramento State University, and started the early college high school program at Golden Eagle Charter in 2024. Students in the program take dual enrollment courses for part of the school day, and high school courses for the rest.

    Althaus-Cressman said that because dual enrollment offers students a glimpse of college, it’s important that the classes aren’t only filled with students who already plan to attend college. Some high schools require minimum grade point averages or have other barriers to entry for dual enrollment, which Althaus-Cressman said can perpetuate inequalities.

    The early college high school program enrolls about a third of Golden Eagle Charter’s ninth graders. Althaus-Cressman attributes this level of participation to extensive outreach, which included working with school staff to call the families of every incoming high school student to invite them to a dual enrollment orientation.

    “We don’t want students to think that they aren’t the type of student for this program,” Althaus-Cressman said. “It’s for everybody.”

    This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.


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  • Universities aren’t entitled to autonomy. They have to earn it

    Universities aren’t entitled to autonomy. They have to earn it

    By Edward Venning, Managing Partner at Six Ravens Consulting.

    Not for the first time, an interventionist Secretary of State stands ready to help English universities. Not surprisingly, every item in her agenda – from regional engagement to business models – will place conditions of ‘wide-scale reform’ upon universities.

    We should reasonably worry. Not because of Bridget Phillipson, but because we have traded away our self-determination for years.

    The debate about autonomy has a certain monotheistic quality. Everyone agrees autonomy is the rock upon which knowledge is built, while vigorously sinning against it. Different governments tie finance to reform, as with Phillipson, or attempt the oxymoron of regulating academic freedom. Meanwhile, universities accept cash with strings attached from government, major donors and international students. Government generally cops the blame for this too, while we appeal to inalienable protections in the Higher Education Reform Act (HERA).

    But autonomy is not absolute or inviolable. It is not determined by functional independence or private status. It is a behaviour. It comes from actively managing a complex web of power relationships and trade-offs while protecting our control over key functions. It is built through organisational design, concerned with incentives, accountability and dynamic relationship management. The more robustly we design, the less likely our autonomy will be tested.

    As nations have found throughout history, autonomy is far from inalienable. Anton Muscatelli points out that this complex negotiation requires constant attention and re-calibration. It must be promoted through the active management of three forces:

    • to comply with state direction and societal expectation;
    • to conform with sector and industrial norms; and
    • to copy each other’s strategies.

    The three forces are not in themselves good or bad for autonomy. A minimal level of regulation protects the student interest. Good standards add value. Some strategies deserve emulation. They are forces for good to the extent to which we use them to improve our engagement with the world. These forces become toxic through neglect, uncritical or anticipatory compliance and inept execution.

    And our approach to university autonomy could certainly do with an upgrade. The defensive case is given a thorough outing by James Tooley and John Drew, in Cry Freedom: The regulatory assault on institutional autonomy in England’s universities (2024). In this entertaining beasting of the Office for Students, they draw invidious comparisons between what the regulator is supposed to do and what it actually does. They devastate Susan Lapworth’s claim that institutional autonomy can be overridden. Only a lawyer might improve (or rebut) their analysis of regulatory overreach, even if the reader wonders what, short of class action, would induce DfE and OfS to accept their recommendations.

    The sector shackles itself

    Equally, a fair-minded judge would accept that the sector’s supine approach to autonomy undermines their case for change. Our surrender of autonomy to the state for money is part of a wider readiness to sell the pass in exchange for benefit.

    No one can blame the government (or indeed any major industry or donor) for offering a Faustian pact. It is in their nature to seek control. Nor should universities be blamed for seeking patronage from the state, the market or indeed non-state actors. No one, as Jo Johnson recently argued in his report about the China question, would seriously suggest universities should disengage from the world. Instead, we need a robust, dynamic framework for engagement, exerting maximum self-determination in some areas while accepting constraints in others.

    It is worth remembering that HERA busies itself with a single dimension of autonomy. This is founded on the precept of the ‘self-critical, cohesive community of scholars’. While of central importance, academic autonomy is one of four dimensions of autonomy recognised by the European University Association. The other three dimensions (organisational, financial and staffing) represent the soft underbelly of autonomy, absent the legitimacy of the academic.

    We lack the toolkit to recognise and manage trade-offs across all four of the EUA’s dimensions. Regulatory interest in academic freedom is a clear-cut incursion on academic autonomy. The same is true of staff and student demands to end relationships with Israeli universities. Pressure on non-academic autonomy is often ostensibly internal. The University and College Union’s (UCU) Four Fights, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have all successfully targeted the non-academic dimensions of autonomy. In fact, there is almost always a dynamic connection between internal and external forces. After all, the 1968 protests began with the right of male and female students to sleep together and ended by permanently altering university governance.

    Away from the academic space, autonomy is lost in less obvious ways.

    For example, universities cede considerable organisational autonomy through voluntary commitments to a wide range of charters, benchmarks and league tables. But each external assurance scheme concedes executive room for manoeuvre. Almost worse for a knowledge institution, they concede expertise to a third party. The schemes are regressive because they create a planning burden that small institutions cannot service. And the goalposts move without our input – all assurance schemes ratchet their criteria over time. Sometimes this means that compliance may seem tantamount to wishful thinking. Even critics get confused. At one point, the last government was simultaneously asking universities to leave some schemes (such as Stonewall’s famous Diversity Champions Programme and Athena Swan) and adopt others (such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism).

    Ganging up

    Autonomy can be defined as a type of managed interdependence. It is possible to collaborate with third parties and still maintain self-determination. Indeed, this may be the only way most universities can achieve the scale necessary to confront the most monumental tasks.

    Active, relational autonomy is central to effective partnership with government, industry and civil society in complex, interconnected challenges. For example, some of the biggest bets in biotech and STEM have been made as joint ventures.

    At the operational level, control over admissions and technology is rightly seen as foundational, and yet we are content for UCAS and Jisc to manage critical processes and infrastructure. Meanwhile, numerous universities have spent millions trying to build a proprietary full-stack online learning offer, while Silicon Valley spends billions on the same task. Arguably, our autonomy is weakest when we go it alone.

    This will become increasingly pressing as stressed universities contemplate the possibility of forced merger. What mechanisms will sustain their autonomy, identity and distinctiveness in the arms of a bigger institution?

    As shown by Gill Evans, much of the sector used to operate within much larger non-academic organisations, such as local government. Even the most autonomous parts of the sector were interdependent. The collegiate traditions of Oxford and Cambridge demonstrate how shared governance protects autonomy while enabling scale. Royal Charters were mostly awarded to institutions which were (then or subsequently) members of a bigger university. Group structures and formal partnerships between institutions provide varying degrees of freedom to their constituent parts, above a critical threshold of autonomy. These arrangements distribute risk and create safety in numbers, mitigating the hierarchy that makes some institutions more vulnerable than others.

    Asserting autonomy

    The sector needs more muscular collective action. Individual institutions struggle to resist pressure from regulators, funders and other stakeholders. A stronger sector voice could help establish red lines while engaging constructively with reform agendas.

    As argued in my recent debate paper, the overall ability of the sector to exert its autonomy is low compared to other sectors. This has several solutions. We need to establish a strong, leadership body across the tertiary ecosystem, robustly managing the big picture on resource distribution and regulatory burden. We need more sophisticated uses of corporate form, not just the blunt instrument of M&A. But above all, we need to recover an assertive self-confidence.

    Let’s be inspired by the private sector and our own history. The original English universities were guilds, muscular and monopolistic in behaviour. Commercial autonomy is not abstract or passive, nor does it derive in a mystical way from the capitalist impulse. It is a self-generating, assertive precondition for entering the market. If universities cannot make a positive case for self-determination, and are not inclined to exercise it, we cannot expect the government of the day – or anyone else – to respect our autonomy. Instead, we need dynamic, structured engagement with external and internal forces. Autonomy will be the result.

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