Community college courses for high school students explode in Idaho, Indiana – The 74

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Hector Torres wishes he hadn’t waited so long to start college.

This is not the weighty middle-aged regret of lost dreams. It’s the lament of an Indianapolis high school senior who waited until late into his sophomore year – gasp! – to take advantage of the college courses Indiana offers to high school students for free or for a nominal fee.

Indiana is one of the few states where entering college as a sophomore makes you a late bloomer. The state is just behind Idaho at the forefront of an early college credit movement as states increasingly encourage high school students to take college courses, mostly at community colleges.

In Idaho and Indiana, high school students make up more than half of the students in community college classes, according to a report released this summer by Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. Iowa and Montana follow, with high school students accounting for more than 40% of all community college enrollment, while eight other states account for more than 30% of enrollment.

On the other hand, states like Rhode Island and Connecticut have not joined the push, with high schoolers making up just 6 and 10 percent of community college students, respectively.

High school students have long been able to get a head start in academic achievement, traditionally through taking accelerated Advanced Placement courses and taking national Advanced Placement tests that were introduced in the 1950s. The universities then decide which credits to award based on the test results. The College Board continues to offer 39 AP course policies and tests each year.

In recent decades, however, the need to earn early college credits has become increasingly urgent as college costs have skyrocketed and employers increasingly require students to study beyond high school. States have seen a dramatic increase in early college, dual enrollment, or dual credit, where high school students take classes on college campuses or high school teachers offer college courses .

According to Columbia University’s Early College Research Center, these approaches have resulted in the number of high school students earning college credit more than doubling to 1.5 million per year since 2011. About 75% are enrolled in community colleges, with the remainder enrolled in four-year schools. Columbia researchers also estimate that more than a third of high school students take at least one college class before graduating.

“The challenge for communities, families and students is to…get through your freshman year of high school or make it in high school,” said Columbia Professor John Fink. “This is a very compelling proposal on affordability for students and families, and this is obviously an important issue that we all care about.”

In a state as aggressive as Indiana, it’s normal for students like Torres, a junior at Believe Circle City High School, to take quantitative reasoning at Ivy Tech Community College this fall after studying psychology and introductory criminology as a junior.

“I was always kind of in trouble,” Torres said of himself as a freshman. “I didn’t really care about school stuff. It wasn’t until last year that I started the actual work and decided to take dual enrollment seriously.”

“Now I’m trying to rush things,” said Torres, who wants to get a degree before starting a career as a police officer. “I wish I had started early when they gave me the opportunity.”

Fink and other Columbia researchers reported in October that students who take college courses early are more likely to enroll in college straight out of high school and are more likely to earn technical certificates, associate’s degrees and bachelor’s degrees.

By taking courses directly at a college, students automatically earn credits, which is often more attractive to students than AP courses that require converting test scores into credits, said Julie Edmunds, director of the Early College Resource Center at the U of North Carolina-Greensboro.

“If all coursework depends on passing a single exam on a single day, there are students who will not succeed in such an environment, and the proportion of AP graduates who actually receive credit is much lower,” so Edmunds said.

Other factors make taking college courses attractive to some students, including the opportunity for students who are intimidated by college to try it out or colleges that offer courses such as advanced physics or foreign languages ​​that their high schools cannot offer.

Although nearly all states allow high school students to take college courses, there is no consensus on how much to support and how to pay for it. A 2022 report from the Education Commission of the States found that there are wide disparities in the training teachers need to teach college classes, which students can take them, and who pays them.

The study found that high school students in 26 states must first meet college admission requirements, while other states do not. Nineteen states required students to receive a recommendation from a school official, while others required students to pass tests or simply let students decide for themselves.

States also differ in which community college courses automatically count toward four-year degrees.

And states are divided over who pays for the early credits, the study found: States like Alabama and South Carolina require high school students to pay full tuition, while states like Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina , Ohio and Washington, DC tuition pays the entire cost of the courses.

The Idaho State Board of Education attributes its high community college enrollment rate to the state’s Advanced Opportunities program, which provides students up to $4,625 to pay for college courses.

And there are also big differences between students who enroll in only a few college classes and students in so-called “early college high schools,” where coursework takes priority and schools offer more specialized counseling and specific courses to help students succeed help.

“When you expand access to college, you can’t just send everyone into college courses without giving them some level of support,” Edmunds said.

In Indiana, where officials boast of being a national leader in early lending, having a single community college, Ivy Tech, with 45 campuses across the state under one roof makes coordination between schools easier.

The state also made college credits more valuable starting in 2013 by creating the Indiana College Core, a collection of 30 college credits — some math, some English, some science, some social studies — that are guaranteed to be transferable to any public institution in the state. This way, students know that the courses they take in high school will count toward any public or private school of their choice.

The state also encourages high schools to offer students courses in this core area, allowing some to complete them to graduation.

Chris Lowery, Indiana’s commissioner of higher education, said high schools have slowly begun offering the courses, with 84 of about 500 offering them three years ago. He said he and state Superintendent Katie Jenner pushed other schools to add it, bringing the number to 275.

That often means teachers like Brooklyn Raines, an English teacher at Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, teach Ivy Tech classes at the school. Although Raines is an Indianapolis Public Schools employee, she had to apply to Ivy Tech as an instructor, attend early college training in the summer, and have her Introductory Creative Writing curriculum approved by the community college’s English department.

She now teaches this course three days a week at Crispus Attucks on behalf of Ivy Tech. Despite concerns that college-level work is too much for younger students who haven’t learned as much as older students, Raines said her students are capable of it.

“Despite the stigma that they are not traditional college students and therefore cannot retain the information or keep up with the information, they continue to prove that they can,” Raines said.

In other cases, students take Ivy Tech courses online. So last year, Layla Kpotufe, a classmate at the same high school as Torres, took a world politics class in which she debated whether she should continue her political science path or follow her previous interest in neuroscience.

Kpotufe, who has already earned an associate degree in general studies, said the Ivy Tech courses could cut the cost of her bachelor’s degree nearly in half.

“It would definitely save a lot of money,” she said. “That’s why I think Ivy Tech is a really good opportunity for people, especially if you want to stay in-state.”

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