More high schoolers earn more college credits -- but will they complete a degree?

Dual enrollment -- students taking college classes in high school -- is growing rapidly writes Hechinger's Jill Barshay. The cost to subsidize 2.5 million dual students may amount to $1 billion a year.

Photo: Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels

But it's not clear earning college credits in high school is helping students complete a degree, according to a new analysis by the Community College Research Center (CCRC), at Columbia's Teachers College and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Dual-enrollment students are somewhat more likely to enroll in college than the average -- 80 percent compared to 70 percent -- but these were more motivated and higher-achieving students to start with.

Despite starting with college credits, only 36 percent who enrolled in college immediately after high school earned a bachelor’s degree in four years, compared to 34 percent of non-dual students, researchers found. Fifty-eight percent of "dual" students did not complete a four-year or two-year degree or a vocational certificate within four years.

To qualify for dual enrollment, "students usually need to have done well on a test, earned high grades or be on an advanced or honors track in school," Barshay writes. The fact that they do slightly better doesn't show that dual enrollment made a difference.

“Are we subsidizing students who were always going to go to college anyway?” asked Kristen Hengtgen, a policy analyst at EdTrust. “Could we have spent the time and energy and effort differently on higher quality teachers or something else?”

Whites are more likely to take dual-enrollment classes, and blacks and Hispanics less likely, the report's data dashboard shows. Asian students are 5 percent of total enrollment and 5 percent of dual enrollment. (Asians are more likely than any other group to take Advanced Placement classes and pass AP exams.)

Dual enrollment helps black, Hispanic and low-income students the most, concludes economist Tatiana Velasco, lead author of the CCRC report. Blacks, in particular, are much more likely to complete a bachelor's degree within four years (29 percent) as those who didn't earn dual credits (18 percent). For Hispanics, the completion rate is 25 percent compared to 19 percent.

But, again, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

I suspect that high school students who take classes on college campuses from college instructors with college-age classmates learn the most and are better prepared for college.

But that's not the norm, Barshay writes. In most cases, these classes are taught at the high school by a high school teacher who's received some extra training or by a drop-in community college instructor. Classmates are fellow high school students. Students may not be getting an introduction to college-level expectations.