Are Dual Enrollment Programs a Good Option for Increasing Postsecondary Opportunities?

With the goal of improving the competitiveness of their workforces, many states and regions are searching for the best policies to encourage participation in educational opportunities beyond high school. Dual enrollment plans are one type of such policies that enable students to enroll in postsecondary level courses while still in high school.

According to a recently released study that examines Ohio’s dual enrollment plan, 47 states have enacted policies related to dual enrollment as of August 2006. A joint publication by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), The Promise of Dual Enrollment: Assessing Ohio’s Early College Access Policy is the first report that collects and analyzes available data on the state’s program since its inception 18 years ago. The report provides insight into the participation rates, accessibility, levels of success, and costs of the policy to the state.

Initially, the Ohio Post Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) Policy was intended to allow high school juniors and seniors the opportunity to enroll in college courses and receive high school and college credit at no cost to the student. In 1997, the program was extended to allow freshmen and sophomores to participate, making it one of six states to do so. Depending on the percentage of each student’s time spent in PSEO studies, the Ohio Board of Education transfers an amount of the state’s annual per-pupil allotment to the participating postsecondary institution instead of the local school district. By Ohio law, students and their parents or guardians must receive counseling regarding the program to participate, and students must have a 3.0 grade average in the subject area they would like to take advanced courses.

By piecing together data from different sources, the report estimates that less than 5 percent of Ohio high school students participate in PSEO opportunities, two out of three PSEO participants are female, and participation rates are lower around the Columbus and Cincinnati metro areas and the rural parts of the state. The report also notes PSEO students are more likely to attend college, with 70.8 percent of participants who graduated in 2003 enrolled at Ohio public colleges. This is compared to the 58.7 percent of Ohio high school graduate population that attended college anywhere and 38.3 percent of Ohio high school graduates that enrolled in Ohio public colleges. Students are more likely to finish college as well. Six years after graduation, 70 percent of students with a PSEO experience attained their bachelor’s degree, compared to 53 percent of the student population as a whole.

While available data allowed the authors to collect and summarize information about students in aggregate, the current data system does not provide the ability to track individual students, their demographics and possible participation in PSEO, and the nature of their postsecondary educational experience. Thus, no absolute conclusions about the effectiveness of the policy can be inferred, meaning it is not known if the PSEO policy encourages students who otherwise would not be heading to college to enroll in postsecondary courses and complete a degree. The self-selection of the students into the program skews the possibility of determining causality.

The report provides suggestions to Ohio to improve the effectiveness and measurement of their PSEO policy, which many states might consider as well. The suggestions include:

* Create databases on participating students that incorporate additional information on family background, and enable the tracking of individual students in the public postsecondary system;

* Collect statewide data on all accelerated learning programs, including Advanced Placement (AP) courses and early college high schools;

* Encourage PSEO participation for low-income and minority populations; and,

* Require all public institutions to issue and accept PSEO credit.

A similar study with a national perspective on accelerated learning options was published by WICHE in June of 2006. In Moving the Needle on Access and Success, the authors looked at a handful of programs across many states such as AP, dual enrollment, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program, and Tech-Prep. This report also contends that better data to perform comprehensive evidence-based research on accelerated learning programs is needed, especially to determine if a causal relationship exists between participation in these programs and increased access and success in college. The authors propose that the National Center for Education Statistics should lead the effort to attain this data.

The second chapter of Moving the Needle includes charts that contain state-by-state dual enrollment program information comparing eligibility requirements, cost structures, counseling requirements, and applications of course credit. The entire report is available at http://www.wiche.edu/Policy/Accelerated_Learning/report/ALO.pdf.

The Promise of Dual Enrollment: Assessing Ohio’s Early College Access Policy was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and can be found at http://www.kwfdn.org/resource_library/publications/pseo_report.asp .

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