Of the nearly 10,000 students enrolled at Brookdale Community College in central New Jersey, about 17 percent are still in high school.

Some of them travel to the campus during the school day to take courses in introductory English, history, psychology and sociology. Others stay right at their own secondary schools and learn from high school teachers who deliver college-course lessons.

They’re part of a practice, increasingly popular nationwide, that sees teenagers complete advanced classes — mostly offered through community colleges — while juggling typical high school activities like sports practices, part-time jobs and dances.

“One of the reasons why we put a lot of time and effort into the high school programs, to get students started on the college pathway in high school, is it’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner,” says Sarah McElroy, dean of pathways and partnerships at Brookdale Community College.

Called dual enrollment, the phenomenon grew for the third year in a row this year. And the growth is steep — up 10 percent compared to last year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That’s significant in an era when college leaders are concerned about attracting and retaining students who may be skeptical about the value of a degree and also worried about the impending “enrollment cliff” resulting from fewer Americans of traditional college age coming up in the next few years.

It’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner.

— Sarah McElroy

Nationally, about a fifth of students who take community college courses these days are still in high school, according to John Fink, a senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center. In some parts of the country, the share is even higher — it’s almost 40 percent in Iowa and Indiana, for example.

Among people who started ninth grade in 2009, about a third took some type of dual enrollment course, Fink says, adding, “That’s a big penetration into the high school market.”

The trend is catching on with policymakers and educators as they look for ways to spur college-going while also ameliorating high tuition prices.

“People are concerned about the costs of higher education: state legislators and governors, families and students,” says Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. “The idea of getting college credit while you’re in high school is appealing as a way of holding the cost of college down.”

Brookdale Community College is in a state that has named dual enrollment as a priority. By 2028, New Jersey aims to double the number of high school students enrolled in at least one dual enrollment course, ensure all high schools provide dual enrollment options, and close access gaps to these programs for different groups of students.

That push is evident at Brookdale. From 2018 to 2023, the college recorded a 39 percent increase in Monmouth County high school students enrolling in its college-level courses. The institution hopes to increase enrollment among high school students by 50 percent more by 2028.

“We are trying to reach every high schooler in some way,” McElroy says.

Yet Brookdale, other community colleges, and their K-12 school partners face a few challenges in order for dual enrollment to “live up to its potential as a lever of access and equity to college and careers,” Fink says.

Good for Everyone?

Dual enrollment takes many forms and goes by many names. Some programs are run through well-organized early-college high schools that help students earn a full associate degree by the time they graduate. Others are more free-form, allowing students to take one or two courses as they please — a style some observers have critiqued as “random acts of dual enrollment.” Brookdale offers several different models through its high school partnerships.

Across these varied formats, dual enrollment seems to have become popular because it’s beneficial for all parties involved, according to education experts.

It’s good for students, Fink says, citing two decades of research that shows it leads to better high school and college completion rates. It’s good for community colleges, which advance their missions to serve their surrounding area — and also possibly create “a larger pool of students coming back to you” for additional classes after high school, too, he adds.

In fact, dual enrollment is “the most consistent source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the past decade,” says Nick Mathern, director of K-12 partnerships for Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit that supports a network of community colleges. “Depending on how you break down the age cohort, there is a way in which you see it’s the only source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the last decade.”

Especially in states that provide extra public funds to support dual enrollment, it’s good for school districts and public schools, proponents argue, since they can use those programs as a selling point for attracting families and students who might otherwise look to private schools, or public schools elsewhere.

These dual-enrollment programs are not replacing Advanced Placement courses, which have been a mainstay at high schools for decades and remain popular, Wyner says. Among the three-quarters of high schools that offer advanced coursework, about 78 percent offer dual enrollment compared to 76 percent that offer AP classes. But one advantage dual enrollment may have over the AP program is that it offers a much wider catalog of options, including some career and technical courses, which may appeal to a broader set of students.

“For a lot of students who are not eager to take more purely academic courses — or about test-taking and writing papers — this is an enormous opportunity to get excited about higher education through fields of study not offered in high schools,” Wyner says.

Some of the high schools that feed into Brookdale offer dual enrollment, AP courses and the advanced International Baccalaureate curriculum all at once, McElroy says: “We are finding students are taking a menu of options.”

One bonus she sees regarding the dual enrollment courses: Students know they’ll earn college credit for taking them, whereas they’ll only get college credit for AP classes if they score high enough on standardized exams.

“It transfers so widely. Four-year colleges are taking those credits,” McElroy says. “That’s helped to elevate dual enrollment across the state.”

Addressing Inequality

Yet data on dual enrollment reveals that not all student groups participate at the same rate.

Racial minorities, men and students who would be the first in their families to go to college are underrepresented in these programs. In the county that feeds into Brookdale Community College, for example, “our Black and Hispanic students are not finishing at the same rate white students are,” McElroy says.

Comparing the percent of high school dual enrollment students by race and ethnicity statewide (orange) and at Brookdale (blue.) Data courtesy of Brookdale Community College.

There are a few factors that contribute to this inequality, Fink says. For instance, some schools use standardized test scores to determine which students are eligible to participate, creating barriers since some groups of students consistently score lower than others. Many dual enrollment courses are taught by high school teachers who have the credentials needed to instruct at the community college level — typically a master’s degree in a relevant discipline — and at some high schools, there is a shortage of qualified teachers. And while some states have arrangements that make dual enrollment courses free for students, in other regions, families have to pay.

“If you have to pay extra to take college courses in high school, you’re going to get wealthier, whiter families taking advantage,” Fink says.

Then there is an older mindset to contend with, one that views dual enrollment primarily as an option for academically advanced students who are looking for enrichment.

It is true that some students choose dual enrollment through Brookdale to improve their chances of being accepted into a selective four-year university, McElroy says.

“We know from the research that dual enrollment courses are more rigorous than the standard- issue high school course,” Wyner says. “And so for a lot of parents and students who are eager to be challenged, they see dual enrollment as an opportunity to get exposure to college-level work and get challenged in their coursework.”

But some educators and researchers hope dual enrollment can serve as an opportunity to broaden access to higher education for “students on the margins of going to college,” Fink says, by boosting their confidence, by introducing them to topics they won’t learn about in high school that might inspire them to consider going to college, and by creating momentum for possible postsecondary studies.

“I don’t begrudge middle-class students and college-bound students the opportunity to take classes in high school,” Mathern says. “But if we are not intentional about how we deploy these programs, we are not actually changing how many students in any given community earn a college credential.”

To that end, Brookdale offers college readiness courses to its high school students who participate in dual enrollment programs, designed to teach them skills they need to succeed in advanced classes.

It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising. ... Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.

— John Fink

“It shows students they can do it,” McElroy says. “College could be for them.”

For more high school students to succeed in dual enrollment, experts stress that schools and colleges have to specifically look out for them and guide them through the process.

“We think colleges should be establishing a shared vision with their local school districts about what they want to achieve for dual enrollment,” Mathern says. “As we open the door wider, we can’t just give more students access to college classes and call it good.”

After all, if a student tries a dual enrollment class and doesn’t succeed in it, the experience can leave them worse off than if they hadn’t attempted it all, either by wasting their tuition dollars, leaving them with a low grade that will follow them on a transcript or by discouraging them from pursuing more higher education.

“It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising,” Fink says. “Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.”

To that end, Brookdale has a dedicated team of support staff for its dual enrollment programs, McElroy says, explaining, “We want to serve the students as much as possible.”

Despite the flaws that remain in many dual enrollment programs, Fink is optimistic that, with fine-tuning, they can serve as a promising pathway to better college and career-training options for more young people.

“There are a lot of reasons we would want to do things differently in the college-to-career transition. It’s largely producing poor and inequitable outcomes,” he says. “What do we do with senior year of high school? Students are checked out. By bringing more career and postsecondary training into high school, you’re blurring the line, and that’s a positive thing for students.”

© Photo courtesy of Brookdale Community College.

During her first semester at Southern Methodist University, Savannah Hunsucker went on a retreat with the other students enrolled in her leadership scholars program. The event took them away from the Dallas campus and into the Texas countryside.

“I remember everybody looking up and being surprised to see stars in the night sky, and I thought that was so odd,” Hunsucker says.

Stars were a familiar sight for her, having grown up in a small town 30 miles north of Wichita, Kansas. Yet seeing her classmates’ awe at an experience she took for granted made her realize that her rural upbringing set her apart.

Savannah Hunsucker, student at Southern Methodist University. Photo courtesy of Hunsucker.

Helping more students like Hunsucker feel that they belong at selective colleges is the goal of the STARS College Network. The initiative launched in April 2023 with a group of 16 public and private institutions that committed to improving their efforts at attracting and retaining students who grew up in rural communities. Programs at member colleges include hosting summer learning opportunities and on-campus recruitment events for high schoolers, sending more admissions staff out to high schools in small towns, and tapping current college students to serve as peer mentors to freshmen arriving from places with sparse populations or low density.

This week, the consortium announced that it is doubling its membership — to include 32 colleges and universities (see full list below) — and that its initial benefactor, Trott Family Philanthropies, has committed more than $150 million over 10 years to programs designed to support students from more remote locales.

This story also appeared in The Daily Yonder.

This growing interest is a recognition of the fact that although federal data shows 90 percent of students from rural regions graduate from high school, only about half go directly to college, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

There are many reasons for this, explains Marjorie Betley, executive director of the STARS College Network and deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago. Students at rural high schools may lack access to adequate counseling about college options and financial aid, or they may not be offered classes that selective institutions look for among applicants, such as calculus. College admissions officers may never visit their communities. And unlike students in many urban and suburban areas who occasionally walk or drive by universities and see advertisements for degree programs, students living far away from campuses are “not getting these incidental brushes with higher education,” Betley says.

“They are not seeing the full range of what is available to them,” she explains. “It causes ‘undermatching’; it causes students to prioritize what they know and what their families know as opposed to what is the best fit for them.”

On top of all that, leaders of some colleges and universities may not even realize they are missing students from rural regions, Betley says, since there are varied definitions of what counts as “rural,” making this demographic difficult to track. But it’s a population that may become more of a priority on campuses as higher education grapples with predictions that demographic changes and skepticism about the value of a degree may lead to declining enrollment in the coming years.

Will Gruen, a student at the University of Chicago who grew up outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, doesn’t necessarily see it as a problem that there is no easy way to categorize students from more-remote areas.

“Sometimes people have a very clear picture in their head of what it means to be ‘rural,’” he says. But to him, “it’s important to realize there are a lot of different types of communities” in rural places.

Will Gruen, student at the University of Chicago. Photo courtesy of Gruen.

Rather than sort students from diverse geographic regions into tidy boxes, he argues, for education programs “what it should be most about is extending opportunities to communities that don’t have the information and the resources compared to other school districts. Places that are less population-dense often don’t have the same resources that you would see in the city.”

To start to bridge that resource gap, staff at colleges that have joined the STARS network were busy during the consortium’s first year of operations. For example, they visited 1,100 rural high schools in 49 states, with many trips including a dozen or so admissions officers carpooling in minivans.

The work is already paying off. Betley reports that STARS schools extended more than 11,000 offers of admission to the Class of 2028, which was a 12.9 percent increase over the number of admissions offers made to rural students in their applicant pools last year.

Hunsucker, Gruen and two other students from rural areas explained to EdSurge what challenges they faced getting to college and described the efforts they found helpful in overcoming obstacles.

Information Gaps and the Intimidation Factor

An early difficulty in the college selection process for some students is getting access to helpful information about all the options out there.

As a teenager, Hunsucker worried about how she’d measure up in a college classroom. She wanted to enroll at an “academically rigorous” institution, she says, but also knew that “I didn’t want to waste my time applying to schools I couldn’t get into.”

“I really did not know where I stood academically,” she says.

Hunsucker’s teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students to think only about in-state colleges, she recalls. But she suspected that a private school or public school outside of Kansas might work well for her. So she did her own research, watching videos other students had posted to YouTube explaining where they’d been accepted and sharing their grades and standardized test scores to get a sense of where she might apply. That led her to apply to Southern Methodist University.

Even after she got in — and was accepted to the university’s leadership scholarship program — she wasn’t sure if she was ready for the coursework.

“I was incredibly, incredibly nervous to get to SMU and start classes,” she remembers.

She did struggle early on in a macroeconomics course. But then she started going to office hours and the tutoring center, which bolstered her confidence.

“You’re going to be nervous because you don’t know where you stand,” she says. “But if you take advantage of resources, you will do just fine.”

For students from rural areas, the very size of a university can feel intimidating. For Blaise Koda, going from a 500-student high school in Montgomery, Alabama, to Auburn University, which has more than 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students, felt like “a big shock.”

“It can be overwhelming sometimes,” he says. “The biggest class I ever had in high school had maybe 30 people in it. I walked into my first chemistry class here at Auburn and there were 230 students in it.”

In high school, Koda adds, “I knew pretty much everyone in my graduating class. I could tell you their name and we’d had a conversation at some point. That is simply not the case here. You see a new person every time you walk on campus. You could see someone one time and never see them again. That’s definitely very, very different.”

Blaise Koda, student at Auburn University. Photo courtesy of Koda.

What helped Koda adjust was realizing eventually that “in the end, you’re going to find your group of people, and you’re going to hang out with them a lot,” he says. “You can make your own little community, and it feels the same, almost, as in high school.”

Recruitment Efforts and Peer Mentors

What would have helped students like these transition from rural high schools to college campuses? Members of the STARS College Network are testing strategies to improve the odds of students feeling comfortable and thriving.

For Gruen, a big help came in the mail one day when he was a junior in high school. He received a flyer inviting him to apply for the Emerging Rural Leaders summer program for students, held both online and on campus at the University of Chicago — an institution he’d never heard of before. The prospect felt overwhelming, he recalls, and he didn’t apply until the last minute.

Turns out, he says, “it was one of the best experiences of my entire life. I met so many people who had such diverse backgrounds and interesting perspectives, while being very down-to-earth, nice people. That’s what made me realize I wanted to go to the University of Chicago.”

Participating in the program — which was supported by the STARS College Network — gave Gruen the opportunity to apply early to the university during his senior year. He was accepted and claimed a spot.

Chicago has a faster pace of life than he was used to, he says, but adds that people in the city aren’t so different from those back home.

“People often say there is a rural-urban divide, but I think that’s not as true as people make it out to be,” Gruen says.

As a rising senior, Avery Simpson is now doing her part to intentionally welcome more students from remote regions to her campus, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Having enrolled at the institution after growing up on what she calls a “farmette” — complete with chickens, acres of flower gardens and her own beehives — she spent her first semester of college feeling like, she says, “I’m really unsure if this is right for me, if I’m going to be able to do this.”

In the city, she missed her family. She missed how she had known most of the teachers in high school, as well as the students and even their parents. She had an early public transportation mishap where she ended up far from campus and had to walk all the way back. She couldn’t relate to classmates whose parents and grandparents had attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I felt like I had all of these little obstacles I was overcoming freshman year that other people were already used to,” she says.

So when Simpson was searching the student jobs portal during her junior year and spotted an opportunity to work as a rural peer ambassador through a new campus program, she jumped at the chance. Now she’s part of a small team of students who make free resources to distribute to high schools throughout Wisconsin, participate in a free texting service where they answer student questions about college, and go in person to visit high schools and inform teenagers about postsecondary options.

She finds meaning in serving as a role model for them.

“Coming from a rural community, sometimes we forget we’re capable of doing what other people are able to do,” she says. “When I’m at the schools, I can see the impact I’m making on these students, and I can see myself in these students.”

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© Photos courtesy of Simpson.

There’s a new battle raging in the long-running war over costly college textbooks, one that may strike a serious blow to the textbook subscription programs promoted by publishers and criticized by student advocates.

The U.S. Department of Education recently started reevaluating financial aid regulations from 2016 that effectively allow colleges to automatically bill students for books and supplies as long as those materials meet criteria that include being sold at below competitive market rates.

This practice has enabled the growth of a digital subscription business model for textbooks, where publishers sign deals with colleges and bookstores to charge students fees in exchange for access to mostly online versions of the course materials assigned for their classes. Known in the publishing industry as “inclusive access” or “equitable access” programs, proponents say they benefit students by saving them money and ensuring they have all the materials they need at the start of the semester.

Current regulations require that these arrangements permit students to opt out of participating — therefore allowing them to hunt on their own for better prices on textbook rentals or secondhand copies. But opponents of this bundling model have long claimed that it’s very difficult for students to truly opt out, due to the labyrinthine processes required or because that option is often poorly publicized on campus. Additionally, since some subscription programs include courseware systems that professors use to grade homework and administer tests, sometimes students who opt out effectively can’t participate in their classes.

Now the federal government is considering changing the rules in ways that would essentially make it harder for colleges to automatically bill students for books as long as they allow students to opt out. Instead, institutions would have to invite students to opt in to paying for textbook subscription programs by authorizing these kinds of charges.

Such a shift would not necessarily doom “inclusive access” programs, both supporters and detractors say. But it could undermine the business model, which depends on colleges delivering student customers at scale to publishers in exchange for volume discounts.

“The efficiencies in the opt-out model would be lost,” says Richard Hershman, vice president of government relations for the National Association of College Stores.

The White House signaled support for the possible rule change. The next step in the process would be for the Department of Education to formally propose the change in the Federal Register and to open a public comment period. In order for a rule change to take effect in mid-2025, regulations would need to be finalized by Nov. 1. Otherwise, any changes would take effect in mid-2026.

Searching for Savings

The business of textbooks elicits strong opinions from nearly everyone in higher education. And the question of whether subscription services help or hurt students is a contentious one.

Sydney Greenway, a rising senior at the University of Pittsburgh, advocates for course material affordability through Student Public Interest Research Groups, or PIRGs. She had her first encounter with the “inclusive access” model during her freshman year at Wayne State University, when she saw a charge for course materials on her tuition bill that she didn’t recognize.

“I didn’t know what it was, I couldn’t click on it, I couldn’t opt out,” she says. “I had to wait for the first day of class to have it explained to me.”

Her professor told the class that the fee was part of a program designed to save students money by delivering them a digital textbook. That explanation made sense to Greenway — until she did some searching and found the same textbook on a different website for a lower price. When she started to use the assigned digital book, she realized she didn’t like that she was unable to print out her readings and that she couldn’t highlight or annotate the online text.

“If I’m reading it just on my laptop, it’s not going to be retained,” she says.

Since learning more about textbook options, Greenway has prioritized finding low-cost options that she can interact with the way she prefers. Her first choice, she says, is for a professor to assign a free, open educational resource that she can print as a PDF at the library. Her second choice is to look on eBay or another online retailer for a physical copy of a used textbook. As a last resort, she’ll go to her university bookstore and rent a used version. She estimates that shopping around has saved her hundreds of dollars on course materials each semester.

“If I’m not paying for $500 of textbooks, that’s a month of rent. I can get groceries that aren’t ramen,” she explains. “It really helps financially.”

Yet proponents of textbook subscription services argue that they, too, are saving students money. They point to data showing that the cost of course materials has lately leveled off, and that student spending on textbooks is falling after years of upticks.

“The savings are real,” Hershman says. “If the material is not below competitive market rates,” he adds, “it can’t be a part of the program.”

But a new report from Student PIRGs calls into question whether textbook bundling programs can really take credit for those financial trends. The research, which analyzed 171 textbook subscription contracts at 92 colleges and higher ed consortiums, was "not able to find clear evidence that these contracts provide savings for students," says report co-author Dan Xie, political director at Student PIRGs. “If the savings are actually tied to automatic billing programs, it should be obvious from reading these contracts that there would be savings. It’s highly problematic that we can’t find the receipts of these savings” — especially considering federal rules require programs to charge below-market rates.

Of course, publishers, bookstores and colleges themselves have other vested interests in the success of subscription programs. Hershman says that bookstores save a lot of labor and time when they don’t have to manage used textbooks, and that it’s a “huge cost savings for publishers and stores” when they don’t have to process textbook returns. Digital subscription programs also help combat textbook piracy, Hershman adds, where students illegally download resources rather than pay for them.

And the Student PIRGs report found that in many cases, colleges benefit directly from “inclusive access” deals by taking a cut of the profits.

“It can in some ways explain why there are some colleges arguing against an opt-in policy,” says Nicole Allen, director of open education for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or SPARC, which advocates for open access resources.

“When we’re talking about charges students have been forced to make by their institution, who then gives money to the bookstore, and then gives a cut to colleges,” she argues, it might create “potential backwards incentives” on textbook affordability for students.

SPARC supports the possible proposed rule change that would require colleges to let students opt in, rather than opt out, to automatic billing for textbooks. That would put pressure on publishers, bookstores and colleges to prove to students that subscription programs really are an affordable option, Allen says.

“If the program is offering a really good deal for students, there is no reason the program won’t continue. If it’s not a good deal for students, the program may not operate — and it shouldn’t if it’s not a good deal for students,” she says. “Make it easy for them to say ‘yes.’”

© Roman Samborskyi / Shutterstock