For the first time in five years, I am teaching a section of Honors World History this fall. It’s a small class with lots of opportunity for interaction between the instructor and the student. That’s right: One student enrolled in the class at the beginning of the term. I’m happy to report that that number has since steadily risen — to three. It’s still well below the enrollment 10 years ago, when honors general-education classes here at Arkansas State University routinely reached their maximum of 15.
Numbers have dropped off in the regular world-history courses, too. Last semester my class had 25 students; 10 years ago it would have had 40. It’s not that our overall enrollment is down — we had record enrollment last year. Nor does this reflect some shift in students’ interests over the past decade. Then as now, most students took world history and other gen-ed courses because they had to, not because they wanted to. And it’s not just at my university. The same phenomenon is at work nationally and in other disciplines as well.
There has also been a notable demographic shift compared with five years ago. The students in my gen-ed classes are disproportionately minorities, adults, and graduates of rural high schools. I am teaching fewer middle-class, suburban, white students. So what’s happened? For middle-class students who attend well-funded high schools, general education at less- and moderately-selective state universities is increasingly a thing of the past. This is especially the case for the humanities courses, but the social sciences and STEM areas are affected, too. Some of this is due to the popularity of Advanced Placement classes, but concurrent enrollment (or dual enrollment) is what’s really driving the trend.
Concurrent-enrollment courses are ones that are also offered in high schools. They are usually taught by high-school teachers. They allow students to receive college credit for courses that also meet high-school requirements. Students pay modest tuition, usually much less than if they took the same course on campus. My employer charges concurrent students about 20 percent of what regular enrolled students would pay.
For students with the economic means, concurrent enrollment makes college potentially a year shorter and cheaper than for those of lesser means.
Unlike in AP courses, concurrent courses are not assessed externally, so a student who gets a passing grade in the high-school course also gets credit for having completed the college course. For students and their parents, the appeal is obvious. These courses let students get much of their general education done in high school at a fraction of the cost of a year of college. Tuition is much lower, students can live at home rather than in dorms, and the rigor of the courses, though advertised as college level, is often more in line with high school than college.
State legislators, too, love these programs. They reduce college costs, let some students finish in less than four years, and eliminate the apparent wastefulness of having students retake in college courses that they took in high school.
So concurrent enrollment has surged in popularity over the past decade. In Indiana the number of high-school students taking dual-enrollment classes in U.S. history jumped from 132 in 2005 to 3,800 in 2015. Unsurprisingly, enrollments in college U.S.-history survey courses in Indiana have dropped significantly.
In Texas, more than 100,000 high-school students took dual-enrollment courses in 2014. Of these students, 20,000 took the U.S.-history survey course. In Arkansas, 17,000 students enrolled in these courses in 2015, an 8.1-percent increase from 2014.
And whatever price middle-class students may pay academically for having done their first year of college in high school, the financial benefit to them is undeniable. Paying $200 for a course that would otherwise cost $1,000 is a bargain. Multiply that by 10 (it’s not uncommon now for students to arrive from high school with 30 credits), and they have paid $2,000 for a year of college that would have otherwise cost them $10,000. They have also saved the cost of room and board.
But to get that $8,000 discount, a student needs $2,000 on hand to pay the tuition. Tuition for these courses is low, but it’s still a significant sum for many people. Because concurrent students are not in degree-granting programs, they are not eligible for financial aid. Some colleges do offer need-based scholarships for concurrent-enrollment students, but there is no national program that ensures equal access to concurrent courses.
Of course, paying for concurrent courses is an issue only at those high schools that actually offer them — something that small, poor, and rural school districts often lack the resources to do.
At least one study links lower income to a lack of participation in concurrent enrollment courses in Oregon. Data from Texas are broken down by race. African-American students there get a smaller percentage of their total college credits through concurrent courses than do white students. In 2016 white students got about 10 percent of their total credits from concurrent enrollment. For African-Americans, that proportion was about 5 percent.
The growth of concurrent enrollment means that for middle-class suburbanites, college is potentially one year shorter and thousands of dollars cheaper than it is for students of lesser means, who must spend more time in college and take on more debt to earn the same degree.
So how do we level the playing field? The best, but politically difficult, solution would be to eliminate concurrent enrollment and AP programs. That way, students from across the social and economic spectrum would have the benefit of being in class together, getting a real liberal-arts education. It’s worth noting that elite private colleges typically don’t accept concurrent classes and are cautious about AP credit. As a result, few of their students avoid general-education courses. Why wouldn’t we want that for all students and not just the privileged few?
The other option would be to eliminate gen ed. Europe has embraced a three-year degree, and most of what we would call general education occurs in high school there. Students go directly from high school into their majors. Concurrent enrollment is quietly creating something similar in this country. While it seems unlikely in the near term that large numbers of students will be able to take concurrent courses in the sciences, because of the paucity of secondary-level teachers with graduate education in those areas, it’s easy to envision a future when most students arrive at public universities with the fine-arts, government, history, composition, and literature components of their general-education requirements already finished.
But the difference between our system and the European one is that European students don’t have to pay extra fees in high school to be exempted from the first year of college. If there were significant differences between concurrent courses and regular high-school courses, or real similarities between concurrent courses and actual college courses, then it might be worth using public money to make concurrent enrollment available to all collegebound students. But these courses are taught in high schools, to high-school students, by high-school teachers. They are high-school courses.
I’d rather see a return to real general-education courses for everyone. But if we can’t have that, let’s get rid of a system that gives already-privileged students an easier path though college, while making less-privileged students do things the harder and more expensive way.
Erik Gilbert is a professor of history at Arkansas State University.
