I am not one to participate in the childhood rat race otherwise known as "K-12 education." It just isn't for us. It is my dream to one day see the world accept that formal education as we know it is completely obsolete. Spending 12 years in a classroom for 8 hours/day learning and relearning the same thing seems horribly antiquated. And then we expect young adults to spend another 4 years in school after they graduate. There is definitely a new push to expose college as the debt scam that it is. Still, we have not reached the nationwide consensus that college is useless, so until that day becomes reality, we can continue to play the game. Though now it is a goal to do it as inexpensively as possible.
Dual credit is a great way to reduce the time and money that college costs. Some interesting facts about dual credit:
-Research shows that students who take dual credit courses are more likely to enroll in and complete college than students who don’t—and to finish faster, too.
-In Texas, the number of students participating in the program grew by 753 percent between the fall of 2000 and the fall of 2017.
-Studies in Texas and elsewhere have found that dual enrollment boosts key student outcomes, including high school graduation, college enrollment, college persistence and completion and time to degree.
-A study by the University of Texas system found that dual credit students had higher GPAs than students who came in without college credits, and were three times as likely to graduate in four years.
-At some two-year colleges, high school students now make up half of enrollments, according to The American Association of Community Colleges.
The colleges are feeling threatened though. "Dual enrollment is creating some financial challenges for four-year colleges, which depend on large lecture-based introductory courses to subsidize more expensive upper-level offerings and to recruit students to majors. With more students knocking off core courses in high school, core 101 classes are shrinking, and humanities departments are losing money and majors. A Texas study found the most common dual enrollment courses taken from 2012 to 2015 were English 1301 (Composition I), English 1302 (Composition II), History 1302 (United States History II), Government 2305 (Federal Government), History 1301 (United States History I), Economics 2301 (Principles of Macroeconomics), and Math 1314 (College Algebra)...Last year, the American Association of University Professors issued a position paper that warned that, when it comes to dual enrollment, “financial considerations stemming from decreased enrollment too often predominate over pedagogical concerns.”
“Dual credit courses are not the equivalent of traditional college courses,” said James Klein, a history professor at Del Mar College, a two-year institution in Corpus Christie, Texas, who helped draft the paper."
Fantastic article regarding dual credit: