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In today’s edition, what’s up with dual enrollment, learnings from this year’s ASU+GSV Summit, and whether adding football improves college enrollment.

EVENTS

📈 Opportunities to grow enrollment will be the topic of the “Next Office Hour” on Thursday, May 2 at 2 pm ET/11 am PT. I’ll be in conversation with:

• Angel Pérez, CEO of National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC)
• Abbey Bain, Vice-Chancellor for Student Engagement, Louisiana State University-Alexandria, which has seen a 44% increase in enrollment in the last decade in part by awarding credit for prior learning.
• Carlos Sanchez of Davenport University, where he is Executive Director of Casa Latino, a new set of bilingual degree programs to attract Latino learners in Michigan.

👉 Register for free. (Support from Cengage)

🖥️ On May 1, I’ll be joining my friends at Grown & Flown at 8 p.m. ET as part of their admissions group to provide an update on this crazy year for enrolling in college and what it might portend for next cycle. If you join that group now, you can get a 21-day free membership that includes a great line-up of weekly live sessions, including mine on May 1. Sign up here.

THE LEAD

The biggest growth area in enrollment for community colleges isn’t working adults or new high-school graduates looking for a cheaper alternative to four-year colleges. It’s high school students.

Even as enrollment in community colleges plunged during the pandemic, one bright spot was dual enrollment. That’s where high school students take courses for college credit in partnership with a local institution, typically a community college. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of dual-enrollment students spiked by nearly 13% at community colleges, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Dual enrollment students now account for nearly one in five community college students nationally.

Colleges love dual enrollment because it’s a source of students at a time when enrollment of traditional-age students is down. Parents and students love dual enrollment because it offers a head start on college.

But as Michael Horn and I explored on a recent episode of the Future U. podcast with John Fink, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center, there is no single definition–or standard–of dual enrollment. Indeed, as Fink told us, there are some 36 different terms for dual enrollment and lots of different arrangements: it’s basically anything that gives early college credit in high school that’s not AP or IB.

“It is like the wild west,” Fink said.

We’ve been teasing this episode all season because I get so many questions on dual enrollment from parents, high school counselors, and college admissions officers. So, give it a listen when you can.

Here were my three takeaways from the wide-ranging conversation:

1️⃣ Credit transfer. The research on dual enrollment is still nascent, but Fink told us there is evidence that taking dual enrollment courses accelerates the degree–somewhat.

• You might be able to graduate in four years with a bachelor’s degree instead of what has become the more typical five, for example. The issue with dual enrollment, like with a lot of two-year degrees, is that they basically cover the general-education courses if you transfer to a four-year college.
• But sometimes those are not the right general-education requirements to get into a specific major at a four-year college, so a student ends up taking other courses to fulfill those and then “graduates with many excess credits,” Fink said, which of course takes longer.
• To avoid this, it’s important to find community colleges and four-year colleges that have aligned their transfer pathways, but many high school students don’t know to ask that or don’t have much choice about where to take these dual enrollment courses.

2️⃣ Quality. There’s a 90% pass rate on dual enrollment courses, which is a lot higher than say AP or IB.

• As we asked Fink: Is that a good sign or is that something we should be worried about? “We want students to be passing dual enrollment courses,” Fink said.
• But as Michael pointed out later in the show, does succeeding here really mean learning and mastering the material? “The AP isn’t perfect in coming down to a high-stakes test, but on the other hand, I love that there’s an objective measurement of mastery that’s not from your teacher,” Michael said.

3️⃣ Follow the money. Dual enrollment has helped some struggling colleges fill seats, but at what cost?

• A report by the state auditor in Ohio, for instance, found that about half of its colleges and universities actually lost money on the courses once student support costs were taken into account.
• It’s not only an issue in Ohio. The Community College Research Center estimates that revenues from dual enrollment cover only 72%–85% of the costs.
• At schools with AP and IB, high school counselors and teachers worry about the impact of dual enrollment on sustaining those programs.
• Meanwhile, in many states, if a student doesn’t pass a dual enrollment course with a certain grade, parents are on the hook for the bill.

Bottom line: So far, the benefits of dual enrollment–encouraging students to get a head start on college–seem to outweigh the costs, but with college enrollment falling and campuses looking to fill revenue gaps, the incentives to take short cuts only increase.

What I Learned at the ASU + GSV Summit

I’m still resting after three exhausting but exhilarating days in San Diego at the annual ASU + GSV Summit, which brings together more than 6,000 ed-tech executives, financiers in the space, and educators in K-12 and higher ed to talk about innovation and the future of education. As Quentin McAndrew of Coursera put it during a panel I was on: it’s a lot of “extraverting.” Yes, it is.

But the summit, as always, was a good way to connect with people face-to-face and understand what’s happening in the larger education ecosystem.

What did I learn? Here are the excerpts from the notebook I posted to LinkedIn. Feel free to join in the conversation there in the comments.

🤹‍♂️ Higher ed needs to stop trying to make big bets on the side of their desk and with pennies from the cushions. If something is a priority, make it one by stopping the dozen other things that aren’t.

🤔 The talent bench, governance, and financial models of higher ed aren’t designed for the moment.

📜 We’re too caught up in the language of legacy degrees and credits. Let’s focus on outcomes. That could be 90 credits, 120, a micro-credential, a degree. Worry less about the names and more about the on- and off-ramps.

🚨 But the degree still matters, eventually. As one military veteran in one session said: when he got the degree, he felt like a different person and family thought he was different, too.

🤖 AI, AI, AI. No, we’re not hyping it. But even people we think should know where this is going, in honest moments over three days last week, said they didn’t. How can we help students complement technology? AI will also create new jobs. How can higher ed be part of that job creation?

🥊 Don’t let private-equity firms and the big tech companies control AI. Just like higher ed had a seat at the table during the development of the internet, higher ed needs to control its own destiny.

💪 We need more talent in higher ed. Even when the data tell us what to do, we don’t have people to implement change.

🤝 Trust. Fewer people trust higher ed, yet we still think we’re insulated from what has happened in every other industry. Reminds me of 1995, when newspapers didn’t think the internet would impact us because we were a public trust and everyone would want to get a dead tree on their doorstep.

💰 Affordability matters more than ever.

🏈 Higher ed needs to be more accessible. I landed at a great dinner with former NFL players, who are part of the Pro Athlete Community, trying to bring mentorship, education, and professional development to retired athletes.

For more coverage from ASU + GSV:

🎧 Listen to Inside Higher Ed’s The Key podcast, which has excerpts of editor Doug Lederman’s excellent panel about stackable and alternative credentials with American Council on Education’s Ted Mitchell, Boise State University’s Marlene Tromp, Hunter College’s Ann Kirschner, and ASU’s Maria Anguiano.

🖥️ Watch my main stage panel about the massive experiment in Texas with embedding credentials into legacy degrees with J.B. Milliken, chancellor of the University of Texas System, and Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of Coursera.

SUPPLEMENTS

🗑️ More on the FAFSA Mess. The Atlantic’s Adam Harris has a good piece on the origins of the botched rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. As he writes, “the Biden administration could have focused on making sure that FAFSA worked, though it would likely have had to punt on other priorities, such as student-debt relief. And that may have made a good deal of sense: After all, changing higher-education regulations and canceling debt won’t help students if they can’t figure out a way to pay for school in the first place. (The Atlantic/paywall)

🏟️ Does Football=Enrollment? My former Chronicle of Higher Education colleague Welch Suggs, who is now an associate professor of journalism at the University of Georgia, wrote to me last week with the results of a new study he authored with other academics on a question that comes up often: does adding football to the line-up of athletics at a college help enrollment?

• The answer? No. As he wrote to me, “colleges adding football saw a small spike in enrollment, primarily male enrollment, in the first year or two after their teams began play. After that, there was no difference in enrollment growth, male enrollment growth, or tuition revenue between football-adding institutions and peer colleges that never added the sport.”
• For more coverage of the research, see this article in The Chronicle.

📥 New Overtime Rules. “Colleges and universities across the country will be forced to provide either a pay raise or overtime benefits to thousands of admissions officers, student affairs professionals and athletics staffers under a new rule finalized by the U.S. Department of Labor on Tuesday. Previously, universities were exempt from clocking work hours and providing overtime pay to any employee salaried at or above $35,568. The new rule raises that bar nearly 65 percent to $58,656.” (Inside Higher Ed)

OUT AND ABOUT

🎓 On Monday, April 29 at 7pm at the Community Center’s Alden Theatre in McLean, Virginia for the Safe Comunity Coalition to discuss stress-free college admissions. Tickets are $15 in advance and $20 at the door. Space is limited. Register here.

🛫 In Los Angeles, May 6-7, for the annual Milken Global Conference to moderate a panel on the future of the degree and take part in other education programming. If you’ll be there, let me know.

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff