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In this one I’ll outline a dilemma I’ve seen and hope that some wise and worldly readers have found elegant ways around it.
In dual-enrollment programs, high school students take college classes that count for both high school and college credit. Programs come in various styles and are funded in different ways, but the curricula need to be built in ways that allow single courses to serve two sets of requirements.
That sounds straightforward enough, and if students are only taking a couple of courses that way, it is. Senior years of high school (at least in the U.S.) are notoriously full of electives; if an elective slot or two is devoted to college courses, so be it. But many dual-enrollment programs are much more ambitious than that, aiming to have students accumulate a year or two of college credit while in high school.
Fitting 60, or even 30, credits into high school while still hitting every high school graduation requirement means choosing majors that parallel high school graduation requirements. Typically that will mean something like a liberal arts transfer major. A major like that features a healthy portion of gen ed classes that will transfer into whatever major the student chooses upon subsequent matriculation. For the future history major, it’s an elegant fit.
But most students don’t want liberal arts majors when they get to college. They’re much more likely to switch into business or nursing or engineering. And when they do, a dispiritingly large chunk of those early-college credits won’t count.
To the extent that dual enrollment is about making the senior year of high school more academically challenging, that’s not a problem. But to the extent that dual-enrollment credits are supposed to save time and money later, having most students get significant numbers of credits disallowed when they declare a major partly defeats the purpose.
(As community college folks know well, there’s a separate issue of four-year schools applying inconsistent criteria to dual-enrollment credits. But for present purposes, I’m focusing on choice of major.)
It’s unrealistic to ask most high schools to offer the range of majors that many colleges offer. And even if they did, I have to assume that many students who choose a track at age 14 will change their minds later. It would be weird if they didn’t.
In theory, “meta-major” classes taught in high school might help. They’re broad introductions to general fields, designed to give students an idea of whether a particular field is right for them. But most meta-majors probably wouldn’t align with high school graduation requirements, and even if they did, the demands on the instructors would be significant.
I can’t possibly be the first person to notice this. So this is where I turn to my wise and worldly readers in hopes that some have found reasonably workable solutions. Is there an elegant way to build in a significant number of credits that track with high school graduation requirements without setting students up for disappointment when they enroll in something else later?
As always, I can be reached via email at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com or on Twitter (@deandad). Thanks!
