A Guide to Early College and Dual Enrollment Programs

Designing and Implementing Programs for Student Achievement

Russ Olwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000351279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungsverwaltung

This is an accessible guide for school leaders and educators who seek to build, support, and expand effective early college and dual enrollment programs in their communities. One of the first books to bring together research in a practical way, this book is full of real stories, critical insights from leaders, teachers, and students, examples of what works and doesn't work, and strategies to help students successfully make an important jump in their lives, putting them on track to post-secondary education and a career. Whether you're starting a program from scratch or want to improve an existing dual enrollment and early college program, this book will provide you with the research base, tools, and resources to understand where you and your students fit into the national landscape, and provide guidance and inspiration on the journey to creating an effective program.

SECTION Two

Supporting and Engaging Students

4 Supporting Student Learning in Early College and Dual Enrollment Programs

Even for our most talented high school students, being in a college classroom as part of an early college or dual enrollment program can be a stretch, and the jump to full-time college enrollment can be a long one. One of the top early college students at Lawrence High School (Massachusetts), Jean Espinal, took advantage of all the early college options he could, falling in love with the field of biology in the process. However, his move to Brown University as a first-year student was still an academic struggle, because of the wide scope and fast pace of his STEM course load. He found he needed to prioritize academic support, getting in contact with professors and teaching assistants from the first day of class, not even waiting for a low grade to prompt looking for support.

Figure 4.1 Potential student supports for early college and dual enrollment programs

Dual enrollment and early college programs can produce college success only to the extent to which their graduates are prepared to navigate their relationships with professors and other support professionals, and to use those relationships to succeed. Even our top performers, on their own, are bound to struggle eventually, and those navigation skills will be critical to their classroom performance, to staying in the major of their choice, and to their college graduation.

Recruitment

In many ways, support for students in early college programs starts before they enroll. Students may not see themselves as college “material” and will need support to simply put themselves forward as a candidate for the program. Early college and school staff can assist in this process by getting the word out applying for the program broadly, and actively encouraging students to apply even when they are not positive they are ready for the experience. Without this support, research suggests that students from first-generation families, students from immigrant families, students of color, and young men will not necessarily apply, and the program will never know what it has lost out on.

Among the toughest challenges for early college and dual enrollment programs is to be able to reach out to the students who will benefit the most. Both early college and dual enrollment programs have tended to attract better educated, more affluent, and more motivated families. Building programs that represent the demographics of their community, as well as students who will truly benefit, is an ongoing challenge.

The first way to address this challenge is to identify the key places students might be coming from. In the case of Early College Alliance (ECA), in Ypsilanti, Michigan, this was middle and high schools from throughout the districts served. Recruitment nights were held, and community members gradually learned more about the resources that were available. However, ECA targeted their recruiting efforts to make sure that the free and reduced lunch rate of the student body matched the community, and that the demographics included representation of African-American and Latinx students.

Even in areas with great diversity, groups of students can be left out of recruitment. In Massachusetts, most early college students are first-generation, from low-income families and mostly immigrant backgrounds. However, English language learners can be easily overlooked because they have arrived in the U.S. in the middle of their middle or high school careers. Several programs now assess all high school students for early college potential and draw on the students in “newcomer academies,” to find students whose intellectual and academic abilities are ready for early college material, but who will need some English language support to help that successfully occur.

Lead to Launch: Kristin Hunt

Kristin Hunt has overseen early college programs in Massachusetts and believes that:

1. 1. Early college and dual enrollment programs need to provide intentional and dedicated support services, rather than relying on tutoring or support already offered in either K-12 or higher education systems.
2. 2. With the right level of support, many more students, and many different types of students, can find success in early college and dual enrollment programs.
3. 3. Programs need to turn their notion of who may make a good fit for the program “upside down” and look for students that could benefit most from the program.

Rethinking who is Eligible for Early College and Dual Enrollment

Like many people in the dual enrollment and early college field, Kristin Hunt had experience working in both K-12 and higher education settings before being chosen to coordinate Massachusetts’s early college initiative. She has been a leader in college access for her entire career, working in TRIO and other programs to help students pursue a college education, starting her career with work on GEAR UP in Worcester, MA. She has also worked extensively on transfer issues in higher education, giving her firsthand experience with smoothly moving students between institutions.

Hunt’s office oversees and supports the full range of early college programs in Massachusetts, from two-year to four-year colleges, from state colleges to private. She identified student support as a critical area for early college success, but finds that strong programs develop intentional and specific support for early college students. In other words, programs should not make the assumption that early college students can simply be plugged into existing academic support services. Hunt notes that the key is to “break down the business as usual” approach and use early college as an opportunity to rethink how we support our students. Just expecting early college students to access tutoring services at a college, when those services might already be stretched and underfunded, is a bad idea.

The key to success in early college programs, Hunt believes, is getting everyone involved to rethink their notion of who a successful early college student might be. She offers, “You need to turn expectations upside down” and look at students who may, right now, be unengaged with high school, or not flourishing in the traditional high school curriculum and setting. These students may not “look” like college material, but the power of early college is that students who do not seem the most promising for admission to the program often are those who would make the greatest gains if they were admitted.

Admission to Early College and Dual Enrollment

Once a pool of students is recruited to apply, early college admissions can be a tricky business. In the case of both early college and dual enrollment programs, if students participate in the program and fail, they are worse off than if they had never enrolled. For instance, they end up with an F on a transcript and a real sense that they are not cut out for college at all.

However, as informed by Hunt’s remarks, students should get a chance, even if their high school career to date has not been stellar. In some cases, at-risk students have responded more positively to early college and dual enrollment classes than their peers. For reasons of policy, some programs require an application, some require an assessment (usually writing and reading), while some are conducted only with a lottery of interested students.

State policies may include some admissions requirements. In Massachusetts, programs run by community colleges are required to administer the Accuplacer placement exam to potential early college students. Those who score above the cutoff are entered into the program, those below are put off to another term. The lack of equity on this system was apparent, and the Department of Higher Education allowed development of an alternative assessment– an essay and rubric that could allow a wider range of student access to early college programs.

This moment of admission is among the most important for a program, because it sets the tone for the relationship between the students, the family, the program, the school, and the college. Leslie Peralta and Niurka Aybar run the early college program at Lawrence High School, Massachusetts, and work with hundreds of students and families each year. They suggest that being clear and upfront with families and students from the start makes all the difference. When students and families enter the program with the wrong information or expectations, the relationship leads to the cases of students failing or withdrawing from the program.

Helping Students Locate and Navigate Academic Help and Support

Successful early college programs explicitly teach students how to seek help from their teachers and support systems. Students are coached on how to approach faculty members and have key conversations, such as why students are not earning the grade they desire in a class, and what more can be done. Early college alumni testify to the importance of learning how to connect to faculty and ask for help, and in academically challenging classes, such as those in STEM, they suggest that students begin to reach out for connection and help right from the start of the course, assuming that assistance from the professor and teaching assistants will be a key to success.

Early colleges, unlike traditional programs, assume that students will need, and seek, support in their college classes. When I talk to high school students, I often stress that on a college campus you need to know where to seek help before you need it. One should know where the emergency room is before you break your arm! While students hear this message, they often do not act on it with the speed that they need to, or think it applies to them. Sarah Cowdell, who is director of the Pioneer Scholars program at Merrimack College, Massachusetts, found that her early college alumni were good at reaching out to her, their academic coach, for support, but were only about as likely as the average students to take advantage of math, tutoring, or writing support on campus.

Going into an early college experience, it is important to know what support the high school staff will provide, what the college faculty will do to help during office hours, what a writing or math tutoring center can do, the difference between support for learning needs at the K-12 and college levels, and the counseling available.

Real Student: Jean Espinal

Jean Espinal is a graduate of Lawrence High School and is now at Brown University majoring in Biology. His reflections on early college include:

• Early college classes can help you fall in love with a subject, and provide ideas for you to major in in college.
• High school students need to get used to reaching out to faculty and teaching assistants early in the term.
• In high school, one can participate in a variety of activities, and often still get the course workload done. At the college level, one may have to be much more selective about student involvement depending on course workloads.

Building “Soft Skills” – the Key to Early College Success

Most of American K-12 education is focused tightly on academic skills – reading, writing, mathematics, science. However, being able to pass academic tests in these areas does not necessarily lead to college or career success. Instead, students need to be able to navigate their own learning and collaborate successfully with peers and adult supports, mirroring their future coursework and workplaces.

One key to successful transitions to freshman year and to the workforce is the concept of “soft skills.” Soft skills also relate to what psychologists call “non-cognitive skills,” which are the habits people develop that promote achievement. In spite of the name, research has found that non-technical skills, and non-cognitive skills, are key to success in school, the workplace, and the outside world. Anyone who has been in a workplace has witnessed smart, capable people floundering at a job, not because of a lack of knowledge, but because they could not navigate the environment or communicate effectively within the organization.

Non-cognitive or soft skills include several key factors that can make the difference between failure and success. Research has demonstrated that these are promising frameworks for boosting non-cog...