As Dual Enrollments Swell, So Do Worries About Academic Rigor

As a history instructor at South Texas College, Trinidad Gonzales is used to straddling two worlds. Four out of 10 students at South Texas are still in high school.

Mr. Gonzales is a key player in the two-year college’s booming dual-enrollment program, which allows high-school students to take courses for college credit at a high school or at the college.

The courses are growing nationally and are wildly popular in the Lone Star State. But their rapid expansion has exposed a rift that Mr. Gonzales knows all too well: the gulf of expectation that divides high schools and colleges.

He has fielded complaints from high-school instructors who are being pressured to pass students who are not prepared for the rigors of the college classes they’re teaching.

He’s gotten an earful from fellow historians who say their introductory courses are shriveling because so many high-school students take dual-credit American history instead, seeing it as an easy credit to knock off before they graduate.

And he’s heard the state’s higher-education commissioner warn lawmakers that it might be time to ease off the accelerator on the dual-credit craze that has swept across Texas.

None of that has shaken his faith in an approach he says “can help break the cycle of poverty by allowing students from low socioeconomic levels to achieve a college education.”

His two-year college, located in an impoverished region near the border with Mexico, is benefiting from a surge in demand for early-college course work. The college, which reaches out to students while they’re still in elementary school, now has 44 percent of its students enrolled in classes that earn them both high-school and college credit. Most are taught in high schools in the Rio Grande Valley by high-school instructors who have essentially been deputized to teach South Texas College courses.

Fueled by desires to cut college costs and improve access to underserved students, enrollment in dual-credit classes has been growing at a clip of about 7 percent a year nationally. In Texas it has more than tripled over the last decade. The state has about 133,000 high-school students — mostly juniors and seniors — taking dual-credit courses.

Economic incentives have helped spur the overwhelming demand. Increasingly, community colleges rely on high-school students to bring in state money that’s appropriated based on contact hours taught. Nationwide, enrollment in two-year colleges has been slipping for several years, in part because of the improving economy. And high-school students who are eager to save money by earning college credits early are an easy-to-tap market.

The rapid acceleration worries even some of dual enrollment’s most ardent supporters.

“If we continue to expand enrollment, we are going to admit students into these courses who aren’t ready for college,” says Texas’ higher-education commissioner, Raymund A. Paredes. If that happens, he says, “rigor will be diminished, these will not be legitimate college courses, and colleges will stop accepting credit from these courses.”

The ‘Magic Bullet’ Factor

Mr. Paredes has been sounding the alarm as he meets with legislators who, in recent years, have passed laws aimed at making more dual-credit classes available to more students, starting as early as ninth grade in schools designated as early-college high schools. Students in those schools, which serve large numbers of low-income and minority students, can earn a high-school diploma and either an associate degree or up to 60 credit hours toward a baccalaureate degree. Texas has 164 such schools, including the 16 new ones approved for the coming academic year.

Mr. Paredes says some lawmakers treat dual-credit courses as a “magic bullet” to hold down college costs, and worries that the booming enrollments are reaching the limit of students who can benefit.

His office has made aggressive efforts to expand college access, but the state’s college-going statistics remain grim. After 11 years, only one in five current eighth graders in Texas will have achieved some kind of postsecondary credential, including certificates, Mr. Paredes says. For low-income students, that proportion drops to one in 10. Fewer than a third of graduating Texas seniors — some 80,000 students — are ready for college in three or four key disciplines, according to their scores on the ACT and SAT tests, he says.

If students who aren’t truly ready for college-level classes are admitted, instructors may be tempted to dumb down the content, skeptics say.

Texas has stringent safeguards designed to ensure that dual-credit classes measure up to college standards, and the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board is working with educators to refine and standardize learning objectives for commonly transferred courses.

The problem, according to many, is that as the demand for such classes intensifies and the pool of qualified teachers is constrained, enforcement has been spotty.

To comply with Texas law, as well as regional accreditation requirements, instructors must meet the same standards a college would use to hire an adjunct faculty member — usually a master’s degree in the subject being taught. Courses must be as rigorous as those offered in college, and to enroll, students must demonstrate through test scores and transcripts that they’re academically ready for college. (The academic-readiness requirement doesn’t apply to students taking dual-credit courses in trades or work-force fields like welding or culinary arts.)

But being academically ready doesn’t guarantee that students have the maturity to handle college-level work.

“The younger a student is, the more the onus is on school districts and college partners to be sure all those dimensions of readiness, including the emotional maturity, are in place,” says Joel Vargas, a vice president of Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit organization that’s one of the primary promoters of early-college programs.

A number of studies, including one Mr. Vargas co-wrote, have shown that high-school students who complete college courses before graduating are much more likely to enroll in and complete college than similar students who do not.

That option, which President Obama has promoted, is likely to expand even further, now that Pell Grants can be used to cover the costs.

Concerns About Rigor

Officials at the University of Texas at Austin are watching the trend warily.

“I think there’s been an overemphasis on early acceleration in terms of credit accumulation and not enough on making sure students are ready to do the next thing,” whether it’s college or work, says Harrison Keller, who serves as deputy to the president for strategy and policy at the flagship campus.

Too often, dual-credit courses amount to “relabeled high-school courses,” Mr. Keller contends.

His campus is trying to bridge that divide through a blended-learning program called OnRamps, in which university faculty members design courses and train their high-school counterparts to teach them.

Those who go through the training are called “teaching affiliates” at the flagship campus, but the instructor on record is employed by the university.

State law requires public colleges to give students credit for courses they’ve taken at another college, but the credit doesn’t have to count toward their degree. When concerns have cropped up about the quality of many dual-credit courses, universities have balked at accepting those classes toward a student’s major. As a result, students who have racked up dozens of college credits before graduating from high school might not be as far ahead as they think.

“We see far too many students pick up far too many credits during high school that may not be relevant to a degree pathway,” Mr. Keller says.

John Fitzpatrick, executive director of Educate Texas, an alliance focused on improving college readiness, says students who are in a highly structured and supportive environment do well in dual-credit classes. But he says the rapid growth has raised “legitimate questions” about rigor and quality.

Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business, offers a harsher critique.

“It’s a false promise if the rigor is not there or if the teacher is not not qualified to teach,” he says.

Teachers aren’t going to flunk half their students, Mr. Hammond adds, so too often they water down the content and pass students, who end up “thinking they’ve completed a college-level course.”

When those students get to college, he says, many struggle and drop out, frustrating efforts to close a skills gap that he says has contributed to 300,000 positions remaining unfilled across Texas.

Shrinking Introductory Courses

The trend also worries educators at four-year institutions where introductory courses in history, psychology, political science, and writing are attracting dwindling numbers of students.

Those courses, which are often lecture-based and relatively inexpensive to offer, have traditionally subsidized the more expensive upper-level offerings.

Members of the American Historical Association discussed those concerns at the group’s annual meeting in January.

Alex Lichtenstein, a professor of history at Indiana University at Bloomington, expressed frustration over how high-school teachers were being approved to teach college courses.

“Only one-third of the teachers in the dual-enrollment program I oversee have ever taken a single graduate-level course in history,” he told his colleagues, “yet we are hiring them essentially as adjuncts to teach history at the college level.”

As more students take introductory college courses while they’re still in high school, Mr. Lichtenstein said, “there’s been a drastic crash in the bread-and-butter, lower-division courses that many of us have dedicated our lives to teaching.”

The history association is encouraging more programs to seek accreditation from the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, which is working to promote rigorous standards.

Finding qualified teachers to meet the surging demand for dual-credit classes remains a challenge in places like El Paso, where more than 1,000 students have, in recent years, used them to accelerate the pathway from high school to community college to the University of Texas at El Paso.

“These courses aren’t a silver bullet,” says William Serrata, president of El Paso Community College. “But they should be part of a silver buckshot.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.