Balancing Dual Enrollment & Community Needs: A Challenge for Community Colleges

Alpena Community College is located on the shores of Lake Huron in the small town of Alpena, Michigan, population 10,000. It seems like a typical, rural community college at first glance, but Alpena is extraordinary: 66 percent of its students are still in high school, the highest rate in Michigan. While high school students are an important group to serve well, this enrollment makeup could spell trouble for the college’s budget and its ability to serve adults in the community.

Traditionally, community colleges have had two missions: supporting transfer to the bachelor’s degree and providing career and technical education to college-age students. But a third mission has recently emerged: providing college-level classes to high school students. Dual enrollment is growing fast and is becoming an increasing share of overall enrollment at community colleges. Nationally, 22 percent of community college students are enrolled in high school. But this expansion of dual enrollment could be a looming problem for community colleges’ long-term financial health.

Expanding dual enrollment pathways can be great if done well. Well-designed pathways for high school students into postsecondary education, like Early College High Schools (ECHS), have been shown to significantly increase college-going rates. If colleges create dual enrollment equity pathways (DEEP), these programs can even address equity gaps. DEEP pathways include proactive recruitment of underserved and minoritized students, aligning offerings with a course of study, providing advising and career exploration, and delivering high-quality instruction, helping students become confident learners.

But most community colleges are not designing these types of pathways and instead are creating an à la carte form of dual enrollment that might reinforce privilege by catering to students who are already college bound. This approach also orients the college around high school students at the expense of adults in their community.

The focus on enrolling and educating high school students can distract colleges from providing the kinds of wraparound supports and workforce programs that would support adults in their community coming to them to retrain. For instance, I spoke to leaders at another college in Michigan with a significant dual enrollment population who told me that offering child care and supporting basic needs was not an institutional priority because they were serving such a large percentage of middle-class high school students whose basic needs were met by their parents. High school students require a different educational approach than adults, and supporting them can distract from providing the wraparound support and scheduling flexibility that adults need.

Community colleges need plenty of resources to support both adults and high school students in well-structured pathways, but they are not getting the resources they need.

While states fund dual enrollment in a variety of ways, most do not provide as much money to the community college for a student enrolled in high school as they do for a student who has graduated. For example, in Michigan, school districts are required to make dual enrollment opportunities available for high school students and to pay the college partner up to a statewide weighted average for the classes out of their state aid foundation grant for dual enrollment.

At the same time, many of these dually enrolled students pay less or no tuition. The cost to colleges to offer these programs is different depending on the model. For instance, programs that are offered in the high school by high school instructors are much less expensive to offer then having structured, on-campus programs like most ECHS.

Recent research found that dual enrollment classes generate revenue covering only 72 to 85 percent of the costs the average community college incurs to educate that student. This shortfall means that institutions enrolling 10 percent of their students in dual enrollment courses experience a net loss, equating to a reduction of between 1.5 and 2.8 percent of their total budget.

Michigan is no exception. School districts only pay community colleges a fraction of what they would receive from the state for a traditional student. Without putting too fine a point on it: Alpena Community College must be losing money on dual enrollment.

Many schools, particularly small, rural colleges, are focused on high school students to generate enrollment. The irony is that they may be undermining their own efforts here, too. Students who have participated in dual enrollment are more likely to enroll in a four-year college after high school. And this could be a good thing for students who are interested in getting a bachelor’s degree, but it is a disaster for community college business models. A small, rural college could end up with fewer traditional students who just graduated high school enrolling in their institution, instead sending those students directly to the local, regional four-year colleges.

And so Alpena Community College forges on, with 66 percent of its enrollment made up of high school students, trying to serve the community of adult job seekers and traditional transfer students, who now constitute the minority of the student body. And doing it all with fewer resources. Community colleges should take a hard look at their strategy around dual enrollment programs and rebalance their strategic plan and enrollment efforts if they have become too lopsided. At the same time, to scale high-quality models of dual enrollment like ECHS, we need significant investment from states and the federal government.