James I. Hinkson graduated from Orem High School in 2011 with two years of college under his belt. His senior year here outside Provo, Utah, was a blur of 13 college courses, most of them beamed onto a TV screen in a multimedia room at Orem High, where a stuffed tiger, its mascot, dangles from a light fixture, and a Utah Valley University banner hangs on the wall.
Like thousands of students straddling high school and college in dual-credit classes that start as early as ninth grade, Mr. Hinkson wanted to save money and move faster toward a degree.
Algebra, art, astronomy, ethics, history, psychology. He sat watching instructors at Utah Valley lecture to their university classes, as well as to students at several high schools across the region. At Orem High, a facilitator monitored attendance from a control room. To ask a question, students would press a button, then speak into a microphone.
Sometimes it was a challenge to stay motivated, says Mr. Hinkson, the 11th of 12 children in a blended family. “When you’re trying to be a college student in high school, you’re surrounded by students who don’t really understand what college is all about,” he says. “A lot of my classmates figured this is the easiest and cheapest way to get through college. If you do your work at the last minute, that’s fine, as long as you get a C and get your credit.”
Two weeks after his high-school graduation, with an associate degree from Utah Valley in hand, Mr. Hinkson moved into a dorm at Brigham Young University. He was already a junior. Three days later, he found himself immersed in upper-level courses, including honors government and economics and the New Testament.
Dual enrollment in high school and college—common since the late 1980s—is proliferating as the nation’s completion agenda takes hold. Earning tuition-free college credit in high school, the thinking goes, saves students time and money and gives them the confidence and momentum to continue on with higher education. But such acceleration, skeptics say, compromises rigor and doesn’t do students any favors.
In theory, dual-credit courses use the same syllabi and adhere to the same standards as those on campus. Advocates of the model point to at-risk students who go on to thrive in college and cite studies showing that students with early college credits are more likely to progress and to graduate with at least a two-year degree. It’s hardly surprising that at least some students with a head start get to the finish line faster. But is it a race?
As lawmakers, educators, and parents worry about soaring college costs and high dropout rates, the pressure on 15- to 17-year-olds to earn college credits early has intensified. The message: Get core courses “out of the way.”
For years, programs like Advanced Placement have given that chance mainly to high-achieving students at affluent schools. Dual enrollment, in contrast, is now growing fastest at schools with predominantly minority populations.
Never mind that many districts struggle to produce graduates who have mastered high-school material. Some educators worry that many of the students hurried through are being set up to fail.
“We’re steering students toward a course on the assumption that cheaper, earlier, faster is better,” says Kristine Hansen, a professor of English at Brigham Young and co-editor of a collection of essays about earning college credit in high school. “I’m afraid we’re going to see the fallout later.”
James Hinkson talks to his professor at Brigham Young U., Kristine Hansen:
“I don’t feel like getting a bachelor’s degree faster is super necessary. … What do you want to get it so fast for?” 0:56
Mr. Hinkson kept his stride at Brigham Young until he decided he’d earned the right to slack off a bit. “I’m so far ahead,” he remembers thinking, “it doesn’t matter.” He went hiking when he should have been studying, stayed out all night with friends, and then crammed to catch up.
His grades suffered, and he got discouraged. Within three months, he had put college on hold and moved back home, an experience he called humbling. “It shot all the confidence I’d built based on having done so much more than everyone else,” he says. “I realized I wasn’t so great.”
In retrospect, he wishes he hadn’t been in such a hurry.
“One of the things they always told us is, ‘We want you to get ahead,’” says Mr. Hinkson, pausing with a smile and shaking his head. “What am I trying to get ahead of? Myself?”
Dual enrollment spread in part to keep high-schoolers from slacking off. Individual courses existed as early as the 1950s, and in the 70s Syracuse University pitched them to local schools as a cure for “senioritis.” A decade later, the first statewide programs rolled out.
While most high schools now offer dual-credit courses à la carte, special early-college high schools provide a prix fixe selection. Variations on both models abound: Much instruction is at the high schools, by teachers the credit-granting colleges approve. Elsewhere, video technology links professors with high-school classrooms. Sometimes high-school students commute to the college campus.
When high-school teachers are at the helm, colleges typically insist on the same qualifications as for adjunct instructors, often a master’s degree in the subject being taught. The National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, which accredits 89 partnerships, requires colleges to provide teachers with training and professional development. But for the vast majority of partnerships, which are not accredited by the alliance, regulation and oversight are spotty.
Meanwhile, demand for dual enrollment is booming. The number of dual-enrollment courses taken increased by 67 percent from 2002-3 to 2010-11, according to federal data. At schools with higher shares of minority students, the expansion has been explosive. In that eight-year span, the number of dual-credit courses taken at predominantly minority schools rose by 145 percent.
About 1.4 million high-school students nationally were enrolled in dual-credit courses in 2010-11, the most recent year for which data are available. More than eight in 10 high schools offered the courses.

Extending opportunities to low-income and minority students—to take academic as well as career or technical courses—has become a key goal in many education-reform campaigns. Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses aren’t necessarily available to everyone, one argument goes. Others, too, could benefit from an early college start.
The fast-track approach is popular among advocates of the national college-completion agenda. Groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have promoted dual enrollment as a way to improve graduation rates, particularly among minority students, and to produce more educated workers. Early-college high schools took off in 2002 as part of a Gates project. Today more than 280 such schools serve around 80,000 students in 32 states.
The nonprofit group Jobs for the Future helps carry the banner. “The populations we’re targeting need a clear pathway,” says Joel Vargas, a vice president there. “The systems are disjointed, and these students have a particularly hard time navigating them.”
An early-college experience, if well designed, helps students build successful habits, Mr. Vargas says. “A blended high school-college environment gives them support before they’re ready to leave the nest.”
Early-college opportunities in all their forms continue to grow. Up to two years of free college credit, along with a high-school diploma, sounds like a good offer, and about a dozen states have policies requiring schools or school districts to make dual credit available. The courses are a crucial ingredient in efforts in Texas and Florida to piece together a four-year degree costing $10,000 or less.
Numerous studies, including one by ACT, have found that students who earn college credits in high school are more likely to continue in college and to graduate on time; some reports have shown a correlation with better grades. Anecdotally, however, professors complain that students come in ill-prepared for upper-level coursework.
While AP or IB classes require students to take a standardized national exam, and a college might grant credit only for the highest scores, in dual enrollment all a student must do is pass the class to chalk up credits.
Many dual-credit courses taught at high schools rely on memorization, contends Harrison Keller, vice provost for higher-education policy and research at the University of Texas at Austin. “They’re really a high-school course on steroids,” he says. “If you simply credential a teacher with a master’s degree and say, ‘Here’s your syllabus, and sixth period is now college,’ it doesn’t translate into an authentic college-level learning experience.”
Kristine Hansen, English professor at BYU:
“We watched two girls take a UVU course on political science, and they just sat there the whole hour … they didn’t even take notes.” 1:34
Questions about rigor have prompted some colleges, especially more-selective private ones, to deny credit for dual-enrollment courses that students try to transfer in. But on many campuses, that credit is the new normal.
Ken W. Smith, a professor of mathematics and statistics at Sam Houston State University, wrote with Diana Nixon in a recent column in The Chronicle about an 18-year-old student who landed in his precalculus class as a junior, with 65 credits she’d earned in high school. She struggled with his tests, she told him, because her learning style was suited to multiple-choice questions.
Across Texas, enrollment in dual-credit courses has quadrupled in the past decade. The state approved 30 early-college high schools in January, bringing the total to 95. More are expected this month.
Many of the schools that have been converted to the early-college model have a pattern of low test scores and high dropout rates. The state is changing them over on the theory that academic rigor and the chance to save time and money will motivate students.
Lyndon B. Johnson High School, in Austin, was deemed “academically unacceptable” by the state of Texas in 2010-11. So LBJ, which serves predominantly minority students whose parents did not go to college, teamed up with Austin Community College to offer an early-college curriculum.
Students have to pass a test proving they’re ready to take college courses. About 130 of 831 students are enrolled in at least one such course, says the principal, Sheila Henry. The rest are in what she calls “pre-college prep.”
“It’s money that doesn’t come out of their pockets, loans they don’t have to take out.”
The school has recently extended its offerings to let students pursue certifications in firefighting, for example, and media technology. “If they’re not on a track to college,” Ms. Henry says, “we want them on a pathway to a great career.”
The school aims to lift all students’ ambitions. Inside a glass case across from the principal’s office is an honor roll that ranks students, based on their latest report cards, as professors, department chairs, provosts, or chancellors. Halls are lined with reminders of admissions deadlines and photos of smiling seniors displaying the pennants of the colleges that have accepted them.
Ms. Henry wants to see more students qualify for dual credit. But she’s not willing to compromise rigor. “Don’t water down the work for our kids,” she tells instructors.
The straight-talking principal encourages students in college-level courses to take as many as they can handle. “It’s money that doesn’t come out of their pockets,” she says. “Loans they don’t have to take out.”
Maya Pierce, 17, is enrolled in five dual-credit courses this year. “Before, I didn’t think I’d be able to get the work done,” says Ms. Pierce, a petite, serious student. Now she’s hoping to get into Texas A&M University to study petroleum engineering. Her college-level courses, she says, have boosted her confidence.
Her classmate Casey Brady says he now knows what to expect in college. The lanky 18-year-old with a mop of sandy hair was “never a fan of hard work,” he says. But after an auto-mechanics class he’d signed up for was canceled, he landed in a college-level engineering course.
“I was bummed out,” says Mr. Brady. “I’d always wanted to be one of those guys working in a garage who could bring an old car back to life.” Beyond a brief period of procrastinating and “freaking out” when the workload piled up, he says, he did pretty well. A senior, he has applied to the state’s two flagship campuses, with dreams now not of repairing cars but of designing them.
Things don’t always go so smoothly. On a recent rainy morning in one of a cluster of portable buildings at LBJ, about a dozen students are in “British Literature,” an ambitious blend of Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare taught by Richard Price, an instructor at Austin Community College.
The class starts with a recap of works from Chaucer and Milton. Then students break into groups of four or five, dragging their chairs together, to act out scenes from Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde. Mr. Price encourages the students to sit “eyeball to eyeball and knee to knee” and assign roles to each group member.
Amid much conversation, two students excitedly plan their costumes as Eve and the serpent. The problem is that they’re picturing a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost. They’re supposed to be in Chaucer’s Troy.
Mr. Price senses the confusion. “You’re in the wrong garden,” he tells them, smiling sympathetically. “It’s OK. We’re moving quickly.”
Colleges seeing surges of students with early credit will have to adapt, if they’re not already.
“We have to do remedial work because they haven’t mastered the basics.”
Some institutions may find that enrollment is falling in entry-level courses and rising in upper-level ones, says Adam I. Lowe, executive director of the national dual-enrollment alliance. “Departments need to rethink how the sequence of courses are delivered,” he says.
The University of Texas at Austin has responded with an attempt at quality control: a blended-learning program called OnRamps. Its goal is to ensure that dual-enrollment and community-college courses align with expectations at the university. Faculty members there, guided by learning specialists, design the courses and train high-school instructors to teach them.
At Sam Houston State, the Student Advising and Mentoring Center offers extensive support to students who find themselves in over their heads. About a third of the incoming class last fall came in with dual credit, an average of 17 credit hours. Some students start with 30 or more hours, allowing them to skip freshman year altogether.
Missing out on first-year courses designed in part to introduce students to college work puts them at a disadvantage—and puts institutions in a bind, says Ms. Hansen, of Brigham Young. “We have to do remedial work,” she says, “because they haven’t mastered the basics.”
James Hinkson, on the benefits of learning with your peers:
“When you’re doing it by yourself, you don’t know if what you’re doing is a mistake.” 0:47
James Hinkson landed in classes at Brigham Young with juniors, he says, who knew how to be college students. They had learned to write two or three drafts before turning in a 10-page English paper. To turn down the music and pass on parties when they need to study. Some of those skills, he says, he hadn’t developed yet.
After Mr. Hinkson put his studies on hold, he tried his hand at sales. He enrolled in BYU courses here and there. He went to work at a call center. But then, tired of dead-end jobs, he felt that he needed to immerse himself in college to figure out what would come next. This past fall, he returned to Brigham Young full time.
With several accounting classes this term, Mr. Hinkson is thinking of becoming a consultant. As long as he works hard and stays focused, he has five or six semesters left, he calculates. But he hopes to set out on a Mormon mission this summer before coming back to finish.
Earnest and reflective, he is grateful for the money he saved through dual enrollment. Not so much for the years he tried to shave off college.
“I have a healthy understanding of who I am now,” says Mr. Hinkson. “I’m still motivated and driven, but I’m operating on a more realistic time frame.”
Now, at 21, he is right where he might have been if he hadn’t started college in high school.