Consider two conflicting facts.

First: college enrollment dropped by 12% between 2010 and 2022. High schools have been scrambling to advise other pathways for a growing not-degree crowd, but frankly, alternatives to the degree are underdeveloped and underfunded.

Second: “Dual enrollment ” is among the fastest growing offerings at colleges. One out of five community college students nationally is actually in high school. For example, of the 11,000 students at the Loudon County campus of Northern Virginia Community College, near me, half are 9^th-12^th graders who either go the college campus a few times a week, or get taught by a college-certified teacher at their high school.

This is like tumbled up jambalaya. We’ve talked for decades about eliminating the underutilized senior year of high school, and combining it with a first year of college…maybe it’s happening without us. It’s like the dirt paths on the college quad that show how students want to get to class rather than the stone walkways the administration wants them to stick to.

My book is out Feb 25!

What these conflicting facts suggest to me is that we are not giving learners what they want. Or what some of them want. And they are finding the loopholes anyway. I know that many students come to college to earn a four year or two year degree. Many careers require it. And many of the 1.6 million underage students who enrolled this year in a college course, or two or three, are getting a jump on their degree to save time or money.

But the dual enrollment craze sweeping American high schools could mean a whole lot more.

It is also a huge opportunity to help two groups of people. 1)Those who might not be able to or want to complete a degree program and 2) those who might need to pay their way through college and could sure use a better than minimum wage job to lessen their working hours and their debt.

With this in mind, the Gates Foundation funded non-profit Education Design Lab (full disclosure, I am founder and board chair) to pilot models in six districts around the country. The aim: to help high schools move from “random acts” of dual enrollment toward helping students take college courses with a purpose.

What is purpose in this case?

Jessica Lauritsen, a senior designer at the Lab, describes the designs as “accelerated seamless pathways to set students up for economic mobility.” It begins to show you what it would look like if we blended the end of high school with the beginning of college in the hopes of not losing learners in the hand-off. Jessica says, “We can take down the fences we have built, especially if we design with students.”

Here's an example of a pathway designed with Chaffey College in California, along with students and employers, where the first job on this stepladder can be trained for during high school and many of the credits toward the AA degree for the second job role can also be earned before high school graduation.

In my book (out next week!) Who Needs College Anymore?, I describe how dual enrollment is coming of age in the Greenville, SC area, a leading example of how the institutions are trying to reinvent the relationship between high schools, colleges and manufacturing employers. This gives us a glimpse of how late high school can blend into college, if we can work out the kinks. Silo-busting is not easy.

Book excerpt: (Chapter 6: Is ‘College For All’ Dead?)

Larry Miller serves at one of the technical colleges, Greenville Tech, as vice president of learning and workforce. School districts have been rewired to support dual enrollment programs. That’s where students can take college courses while still in high school, and millions have begun doing so around the country in the past few years.

Greenville Tech has recently made its dual enrollment program free for all students, boosting enrollment by 40 percent. The college is just beginning to build student interest in using some of those college credits for technical certification. But here’s where the silos slow things down. Larry describes how the “five buses” problem makes it hard to deliver a job-ready student by the end of high school. Learners have to be shipped around between their home high schools, five county career centers, and the college campus, back again, and to workplaces if they have an apprenticeship. And matching dual-enrolled students with companies is a “boutique” enterprise; companies take between ten and twenty students, and each one has special needs. Neither high schools nor employers are wired yet to prepare young people for the kind of technical training high-end manufacturers need, when they need it. Blended learning, what we call the weave, isn’t easy, academically or logistically.

A good technical or community college system can be the market maker. Managing and staying current with different employers’ skill needs is not for the fainthearted. Larry provides some color: “Just as a good example, [manufacturing] plant automation is getting such that the Internet of Things is creating cybersecurity threats on the shop floor. I’ve got demand now [from employers] to also cross train my Mechatronics [robotics] students and other students in how to harden the shop floor from the threat of cyber-attack, as such attacks are on the rise. So how do we do that within the credit hour limitations of a certificate or degree program?” Larry says he is working to break down the silos at his own college to cross-train robotics students with enough cyber and AI skills to protect and maximize plant operations. In South Carolina, increasingly, the technical college is being asked to prepare the high school grad for technical work readiness or apprenticeship, since most students are choosing to go either directly to work after high school or to a four-year college.

Hands-on learning is also seen as a way to keep students engaged. While surveys show fear of debt is the number #1 reason why teenagers choose against college, the second biggest reason I heard from students I interviewed around the country is “I can’t imagine sitting at a desk for four more years.” High school graduation and college readiness rates are higher for students enrolled in Career and Technical Education. That’s why more school districts are offering it to everyone and, like New York City, beginning to require apprenticeships in pilot schools.

And that’s one reason why I am bullish on expanding the definition of college to include other pathways besides the degree. Technology is blurring the lines between what we used to called blue collar jobs and white collar jobs. But families haven’t gotten the memo, partly because the names of many job roles today sound like they are in Latin. We have no idea how to advise our kids. Employers like BMW in South Carolina tell me they still have trouble getting parents to consider apprenticeships, for example. North America’s only BMW plant sends a luxury car off the production line every seventy-three seconds. Even though the training roles in robotics and AI can lead to six figure salaries and jobs that used to be reserved for degree-holders, the memories of the dingy textile plants from a century ago are too close for comfort.

100 years ago the state boasted 14% of the nation’s textile workers, but the jobs were low-paying and conditions were terrible. Now South Carolina boasts growth in manufacturing, tech and health care. And regions are rewiring the school to work continuum. The parent attitude rewiring takes longer.

Dual enrollment is just one way to think about how to fund pathways for students, faster and more affordable than a degree, but also keeping that option open. Because let’s face it, optionality and agility are the buzzwords of the day. The pace of skills becoming outdated is dizzying, while the pace of institutional and policy change is slow and messy.

For more on intentional Dual Enrollment design at six colleges (and their high school partners), see Education Design Lab Insights Reports. Shout out also to Community College Research Center at Columbia University for their research on dual enrollment.

Please check out my book website where we have discussion guides for colleges, high schools, families, employers and non-profits/government. whoneedscollegeanymore.org