"It gives parents a chance to help their kids " - was exactly the point with my kid. She took only 1 college class, but it was her hardest subject - History. Spent tons of time with her father who was helping her and did not need to take it at college. That class had a potential to lower her college GPA. With the help of her dad, she got an A. Her future major was “tested out” by her thru volunteering and summer job during HS.
I don’t know. If it was a help then it was a help on gaming the system and not on internal growth. It is debatable if it was a real help in the long term.
Not that I wouldn’t do it. I would do that for my D in certain case. But I would be knowing what is the price she is paying, and I won’t be proud of it.
@SculptorDad You are clearly conflicted about the idea of dual enrollment. You point out that a bad grade can haunt a student forever. And yet, if a kid can’t make a good grade with a parent hovering just a bit to offer advice, then he or she certainly won’t do so a year later at college. I don’t think it is “gaming” the system in any way to offer advice and encouragement to a child taking their very first college courses. (I reminded my son that he had a homework assignment the other day and he said, “Dad, don’t make a habit of this.” So he clearly feels he’s capable of doing the work without much oversight.
As I mentioned, my son was gung-ho on taking lots of engineering classes until he actually took one. I’m glad he had the chance to do this before making his college choices, as it could have an impact on where he decides to go.
I do agree that dual enrollment isn’t possible for everyone. We can do it because we live in a university town, and so for my son’s senior year he is taking AP Stats and AP English and three dual enrollment courses. It’s quite expensive; we pay half tuition, or about $400 per course. One of his textbooks cost almost $350. However, he will graduate with 58 AP and DE credits, most of which will transfer. If he takes advantage of the Alabama free tuition offer, he can get the better part of his master’s degree paid for. It’s certainly cheaper to earn college credits while living at home and not having to pay room, board, and fraternity bills.
Our local university offered a residential summer college for rising seniors this past summer. For $2,000 students could spend a month-long summer term and take two courses. Students with a 27 on the ACT went for half price, those with a 30 got a $1,500 discount, and those with a 33 could attend for free. (My son just lived at home and took 12 hours over the summer).
Now, there can be a great deal of variance in dual enrollment, and there is a great deal of variance in the quality of AP classes within schools. Some of my son’s AP classes have been very rigorous; others, not so much.
Many universities prefer dual enrollment credits to AP, provided they are from a four-year university. Community colleges tend to be for people who didn’t have a high enough ACT or SAT to get into a four-year school, and I think there is less rigor. Many universities won’t accept these transfer credits. The worst dual enrollment is where it is taught within a high-school classroom. In my view it’s not really a college class. The students aren’t around college students, and they don’t get the college experience. Many colleges will not accept these credits.
Maybe it isn’t for everyone, but we’ve been very happy with it. I would just urge every parent and student to look into it.
Only when it is helpful for the individual student’s personal growth.
I like parent hovering just a bit. It was a condition that dd’s college’s VP made me to promise to. I offered lots of advise when dd was 11~12. By 13 she didn’t need anymore.
By gaming I meant taking a easier course at cc and barely acing it to avoid more challenging course at the university later, probably with lower grade. I am not totally against it. But there are prices to pay in terms of lost educational opportunity. Sometimes an employer spots it and it costs an interview too.
I heartily agree. I don’t believe in the non-existent moral code of parents’ non-involvement with college. It should be case-by-case.
That’s how they grow and obtain the skills. I like that.
Absolutely. However, some high end STEM courses or hobby courses have sufficient number of professionals and smart-but-poor students to make them worthwhile.
Or in my case, most courses were worthwhile because mine wasn’t really in regular college level and only CC level, and she was homeschooled. She would have received many B’s at 11~12 if she were in a decent 4 years college, and it could have costed her chance for good law school with decent scholarship.
That was my main point. I am happy that it worked with you.
No because it isn’t for everyone. For majority (maybe not CC majority), it is best to focus on the current high school than looking for dual enrollment.
Actually, a decent number of strong students start college at community colleges, at least in California. Some reasons:
a. Did not get into their most desired four year schools, so start at CC to have another chance at them rather than start at a less desired four year school. (In California, state university transfer admissions prioritizes those coming from California CCs.)
b. Lower cost for the first two years of college.
c. Other obligations may require part time enrollment at first.
d. Non-traditional students who may be disqualified from frosh admission (e.g. have taken a college course some time since high school graduation) need to take the transfer route.
I agree that it depends on the state. In MD, there is a website that will show how DE classes at each college will transfer to any other state college after graduation. We used this to identify which courses would definitely transfer for full credits, and also which ones would fulfill requirements vs. serve as elective credits. DE enabled our S to take Comp Sci classes that his HS didn’t offer, and to fulfill his Speech class. He entered school this fall with 12 completed credits, which gives him some flexibility to not have to take 15 plus credits every semester, or possibly to graduate a semester early. Three of the 4 DE classes were online courses, which enabled him to learn how to follow a syllabus and submit quizzes, discussion comments, and projects online on a very specific timeline independently…something he hadn’t mastered in HS. He feels more prepared for the rigor and expectations of college, and the DE classes helped him determine that he wants to major in Comp Information Systems.
As for the transcript, the letter grades he received do show up, but they show up under his DE College name as transfer credits. It shows he had a 4.0 at the CC, but his 4-year university GPA will start fresh and not include those credits. If he’d done poorly in his CC classes, he may have had his 4-year offer rescinded, but that wasn’t an issue.
Also, our DS does not test well, and his HS GPA was middle-of-the-road. I think the DE classes helped make the case on applications that he had the determination and ability to succeed in college coursework.
Hope this is helpful to some who are debating whether to consider them!
In our school district, there is an allowance for taking course at CC or University. It is enough to cover the cost at a CC but not at a university. Nevertheless, dual enrollment credits are sometimes not accepted by college particularly from OOS. I know a student with full load of dual enrollment credits and none can be transferred to the school she enrolled OOS.
To take classes at our CC (while in hs) you have to get permission from the school counselor, the class must not be available at our high school, and you are not allowed to receive high school credit for the class. If you really want to take cc classes you can enroll in what they call middle college (a high school located on the cc campus) and you take both cc and high school classes.
I’m on the ++ side of the DE question, but I don’t think it would be for everybody. Specifically, for CS majors, AP Computer Science isn’t that indicative of what college curriculum is like, so taking a few solid community college courses can really help determine or focus interest in that major. Also, for advanced science or math students, it provides a way forward. At our local cc district there are quite a few online courses, particularly survey courses like “intro to Anthropology” which can provide a nice diversification from the standard 5-AP’s per year curriculum that everyone seems to aspire to.
DE has been good for my S, who wanted more variety and less-teaching-to-the-test/busywork. We’re in CA, where the CC options tend to be high-quality and where there are well established transfer paths for CC students and CC classes.
Example: The CC where my son does his DE credits has transfer agreements not only with the UCs and CSUs, but also with prestige schools such as Pomona College.
S has taken Psych 101, two US History classes, Western Civ., and Japanese at the CC. He says the pace is much faster than HS courses, and the discussion more varied.
As for rigor, he says AP has more homework, but isn’t necessarily more rigorous because the homework is frequently test-targeted or busywork rather than content-focused.
Example: AP students are required to take a certain number of pages of notes on their reading regardless of whether the individual student needs that many pages to master the material. This is a time-waster for my S who resents that he can ace a test and yet be graded down if he only turns in 1-2 pages of notes vs. the required 4.
In his DE History classes, his grade was based on 4 tests, a comprehensive final, and 2-3 papers with topics chosen from a list that required students to do deeper exploration beyond what was covered in class for those topics.
S much prefers the college papers to writing FRQ essays for homework because the FRQ work 1) is regurgitation instead of deeper exploration, and 2) he feels that the FRQ format is only applicable to the AP test itself, and isn’t preparation for actual college writing.
S is taking all of his math, English and arts electives (he’s a drama kid) at the HS. Social sciences have all been at the CC, and he’s splitting his science requirements class by class. Example: AP Bio at the HS, but Anatomy & Physiology and Medical Terminology at the CC because they fill requirements for an advanced EMT certificate program he’s interested in.
Finances: DE is free for us, except for textbooks
@MLM Many states, including my own (Mississippi), have passed laws mandating dual enrollment, with a three-hour class equaling one Carnegie unit. The rule is that 9th and 10th graders may enroll if they have a 30 on the ACT; juniors and seniors only need a 3.0 average and 14 credits. A principal’s recommendation is required, but I don’t believe this can be withheld without cause.
I’m surprised @MLM 's school is so hostile to dual enrollment. This is definitely against the national trend.
@billcsho I’m curious about the student whose dual-enrollment credits wouldn’t transfer. Were these credits earned at a community college or at a four-year university? My understanding is that it is very common for better four-year schools not to accept community college credits, but that only the upper tier schools would refuse to accept them from another four-year university. I would never recommend taking dual credit at a community college or within a high school for anyone not planning to attend college in-state.
My son is taking a very difficult 300-level course this fall and spring that almost certainly will not transfer (One school he is considering explicitly says the course must be taken at their school). We discussed it, and decided that when he takes it again he will have a complete grasp of the material, and if he stays where he is he stands a better chance of a full ride and will likely be what Dickens would call head boy. He has decided that he wants to spend no fewer than three years earning his undergraduate degree, so if he can’t use all of his expected 60-70 AP and DE hours, that will be okay. One school he’s applying to will only accept 33 of his hours; he’ll be okay with that, too.
In most cases, letter grades from dual enrollment will not end up in a student’s GPA at other colleges they attend later. It’s more like you have two GPAs, and you have to report both of them and send both transcripts whenever you apply for anything.
I can see that are a wide range of thoughts and circumstances regarding whether DE is a positive experience.
I really have no doubt it will be for my D who just started this week. Luckily she is taking her classes at our state flagship, so she is experiencing the same work level as she would be at the tier of schools she’s applying to. She also has LD and social issues, so this works as a great practice. MWF she has a class, an hour for for lunch, and then another class (this is after 3 HS classes in the morning). So she’s getting a chance to navigate a real college experience but with her normal support system in place. Another big factor – she wants to go into renewable energy (within EE) and one of her classes is a renewable energy survey class in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Things just couldn’t have worked out more perfectly.
Okay, there is one drawback – the school district will only pay the CC rate (because CC is another available option). Between that and our state’s college opportunity fund, we aren’t paying the full amount for 6 hours of classes, but it’s still a big check.
@EarlVanDorn It’s a school district rule, not the high schools. Perhaps it’s because we actually do have a district high school on the community college grounds (for juniors and seniors) with a program that requires they take two high school classes and the remainder community college classes.
I took dual-enrollment classes full-time at a state university in my senior year of high school (2013-2014). They were free (including books) and I went to a small public high school with four AP classes, so it wasn’t a difficult choice. I took an English class, two philosophy classes, and six math classes above AP Calculus BC, so it was essentially like starting college a year early without paying tuition (although I’m not graduating early).
I took Algebra I in ninth grade and my high school didn’t have AP Calculus classes, so there was a lot of class-skipping and self-studying involved in passing the AP Calculus BC exam by my junior year. I had a lot of gaps in my knowledge, but my dual-enrollment experience was very positive and I can’t really say I regret anything. I would still say that it’s best to avoid self-studying and testing out if you can.
And here are some things that surprised me:
- Statewide programs for free dual enrollment will often apply to private four-year colleges as well as state universities and community colleges. However, I chose a public university because they had fewer restrictions on what I could take.
- I lived too far to drive every day, and my dual-enrollment university said they would let me live in a dorm room if my family paid for it. (In the end, I stayed with relatives who lived nearby.)
- According to my guidance counselor, some schools won't transfer classes taken through dual enrollment at *their own* institution.
- My dual-enrollment university had a model where most classes were worth four credit hours. My new school gave me four transfer credit hours for each dual-enrollment class, even though the equivalent classes were only worth three credit hours.
- The state policy at the time was 1 college credit hour = 0.2 high school Carnegie units. So you needed two college classes to meet one high school requirement. For this reason, I finished my high school requirements before my senior year.
@EarlVanDorn Some schools/school districts have dual enrollment programs with local CCs, so the students have no other choice. In some cases, the CC would even come to the HS to offer some courses. In our district, the student can pick between two universities and a CC locally for dual enrollment credits, however, the school district only pays at the cost of CC which is around 1/3 of the other two universities. So most students would do that in a CC in our school district.
The student I know is from California and her high school has a dual enrollment program with a CC. It is a very high rank high school and most students apply to upper tier schools. She got over 20 college credits and finished Calc2 in dual enrollment but she needed to start from Calc 1 again in college as none of the credits were accepted.
YMMV depending on the HS and the availability/quality of nearby local community/4 year colleges.
For instance, the academic rigor/pacing and breadth of advanced offerings at my public magnet was such that students wouldn’t exhaust the academic offerings of my HS including STEM until they’re at a point where they’re ready to take upper-level undergrad or lower level grad courses at local 4 year universities like Fordham, NYU, and Columbia.
This also meant taking DE at local community colleges would have been regarded by the GC and selective college adcoms as lowering one’s academic rigor so it was almost always strongly discouraged unless a given course was not offered at our school.
Yes, college courses often cover material faster than high school courses. Comparing high school courses to college frosh level courses, we can see courses that are commonly a year in high school that a college course would cover in a semester:
AP calculus AB / calculus 1
AP psychology / introductory psychology
AP statistics / introductory statistics without calculus
AP chemistry / general chemistry 1
foreign language year / foreign language semester
University of Michigan, right? Seems like a mistake to attend University of Michigan if one wants to transfer credit from other colleges (either CCs or four year schools), since University of Michigan seems to be rather stingy, according to its transfer credit listings.
Michigan is one of the best schools in the country for math, and I strongly considered attending even though I knew my classes probably wouldn’t transfer. (I was accepted, but ultimately attended a more affordable school.) Their honors math sequence would have been sufficiently challenging, and I would have been able to take graduate classes in my junior and senior years.