Is dual credit over-hyped?
I’ve been a strong proponent of dual credit programs that allow high school students to receive college credits while they are still in high school. Although dual credit programs certainly don’t have to be online or hybrid, many online/hybrid high schools offer dual credit. Some are even located on community college campuses to further facilitate college credit accumulation.
Which is why the article titled The Dual-Credit Risk in High Schools, from Michael Horn and the Christensen Institute, caught my attention. The opening:
“States throughout the country are pushing dual-credit programs in which high school students take college courses for both college and high school credit.
Their logic is admirable. Learn higher-order concepts. Save time and money toward a degree by earning transferrable college credits while in public school so you don’t accumulate debt.
And yet, because there’s no external validation in place to ensure that students are mastering “college-level” learning, the policy is fraught with problems; and, worse yet, shaky promises to students that could turn out to be misleading at best.”
What’s misleading? According to the article,
“For students who take concurrent college courses under the belief that those credits will help them graduate faster, they may have a rude awakening. That’s because first-time students who transfer lose 43% of their credits on average. According to the General Accounting Office, “the average credits lost during transfer is equivalent to about four courses, which is almost one semester of full-time enrollment.” The transferring of credits is the toughest, it seems, for community college students.”
Horn is not writing specifically about online or hybrid high schools. In fact, part of his solution is instead of “settl[ing] for a college course taught in high school, students can now take the actual college course itself online.” He points to several institutions, including Digital Learning Collaborative member ASU Prep Digital, which offer such college courses online, for high school students.
The article draws parallels to online credit recovery, which it says “hasn’t been the disaster that many media outlets have painted it to be, it hasn’t been transformational either.”
Horn also draws a distinction between “dual-credit” courses which may be taught by high school teachers but still carry college credit, and “dual-enrollment” courses which are “actual college courses.” But it’s not clear to me that this necessarily solves the entire problem, or even most of it, because my read of his source on the lost-credits-during-transfer issue seems to apply to community college credits especially, and therefore a student who received community college credits via dual enrollment classes would still risk losing some credits if they transfer to another institution. This issue is likely exacerbated because high school students are more likely to choose the college based on a pre-existing relationship between the school and the post-secondary institution, not based on where they eventually hope to graduate from college.
How much of a problem is this? I don’t know. Horn ends with this:
“Dual-credit programs in high school are surely well-intentioned. But because there aren’t clear quality standards in place for what they mean, high schools and states that push them risk selling their students a bill of credits that likely lack value. It may end up costing students a whole lot of money they didn’t plan on spending when they enroll in college.”
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Does your high school offer dual-credit or dual-enrollment courses? Do you have data on the transfer issue, or measures to protect students’ credits? Let me know in the DLC Community Portal's Blog Discussion Group. If you’re already a DLC user or member, you must log in before you can join or comment in the group. If you’re not yet on the DLC platform, please create a free user account or join as a DLC member to join the discussion.