What drives colleges and universities to offer dual enrollment classes for high school students? Well, many colleges and universities have experienced significant declines in freshmen enrollment in the last ten years—accelerated by the COVID-19 shutdown but continuing since. Some have regained ground by enrolling more transfer and graduate students, but the outlook remains bleak.
This is partly a matter of demographics—fewer students to go around—and partly a matter of the sharp drop in public confidence in what the colleges actually do. That drop in confidence, in turn, reflects two factors. One is public recognition that a college degree is no longer a golden ticket to a good job or a good career. The other—related—is that a college degree is seen as a badge of having been indoctrinated in political views that most of the American public rejects. A third factor driving dual enrollment is the efforts of colleges and universities to capture more minority students. For example, Bard College runs a program called Bard Early College, a tuition-free program that focuses on “Dismantling systemic inequities that inhibit access based on race, immigration status, class, (dis)ability, sexual orientation or gender expression.” In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard and UNC, these dual admission programs may be a way for some colleges and universities to sustain minority preference admissions.
Colleges and universities, in general, are unwilling to face up to these realities and are searching for ways to continue business as usual. That means filling the classrooms with any students they can get—within limits. The limits are admitting students whose presence would undermine the credibility of the curriculum. But some colleges skate very close to those limits.
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Admitting exceptionally talented high school students to a class or two is not a brand-new practice.
Colleges have been doing that at least since the 19th century. But the word “exceptional” applies literally. This wasn’t a way of filling empty seats. It was a way of accommodating the rare prodigies with talent in math, languages, or other areas far beyond well-trained college students. The new game is admitting ordinary high school students to get them settled on the college’s curriculum and student culture.
The transition is easy since many colleges have lowered their standards to a level barely above high school standards. And the model of community colleges provides a handy way for four-year colleges to figure out which courses lend themselves to this mild form of deception. I say “deception” because the students who take the bait and—after taking some courses as high school students—go to enroll as full-time students are failing in their responsibility to survey and explore their other options. They are taking an easy path, and one that generally leads to a mediocre program.
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The colleges pursuing this approach to boosting enrollments probably include a fair number whose financial position is shaky. However, others are just trying to keep their options open as the market for four-year college programs continues to erode and new forms of competition arise. I suspect we will soon see the rise of more programs that submerge the high school diploma in a five or six-year combined high school/college undergraduate degree program or even a high-school-through-masters-degree program.
What we are seeing is a lowering of standards and an acceleration of degree inflation in pursuit of the declining number of domestic students who are truly interested in what undergraduate programs have to offer.
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Image of Early College Initiative Students Welcomed to College of DuPage 2015 — Flickr
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org