A record number of high school students will complete college-level courses this academic year, but whether those higher-education credits will transfer remains to be seen.
The latest federal figures tally dual-enrollment participation at 3.1 million high school students in 2024–2025, up 24 percent from two years prior, the Community College Research Center (CCRC) reports.
Every state has at least some high schools that offer college courses, usually through partnerships with local community colleges, which are expected to count toward a higher education degree. Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. community college students are still in high school, according to CCRC. In theory, a student taking such courses could earn an associate’s degree in less than two years and a bachelor’s in under four, resulting in significant cost savings.
The question is, if the high school student doesn’t enroll at that community college or another institution that provides the course after graduation, are the credits honored somewhere else? Education policymakers and President Donald Trump, under a new federal rule announced Thursday, are asking for action and transparency.
The Department of Education’s Oct. 29 rules to “Reform, Strengthen, and Modernize Higher Education Accreditation” require colleges and universities to explain to students why credits from another school might not transfer.
The Jobs for the Future career and technical education policy organization is asking for federal guidance and funding to establish uniformity with credit transfer policies.
“Local program expansion alone cannot solve these structural barriers,” the organization’s website says.
In a March report, the CCRC said more than 15 percent of dual enrollment course credits completed by Texas high school students through a community college program were denied as either transfer credits or applicability to a major by Texas public colleges between 2020 and 2024.
“The challenges related to credit transfer for community college students are well documented, but there is less information on how dual enrollment credits fare in the transfer process,” the report said.
Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute education policy center and an adjunct professor at Harvard University’s School of Education, said there are many reasons why the credit-transfer component of dual-enrollment programs is so fragmented across states and public university systems, not to mention private higher education institutions.
In many instances, faculty members questioned whether a high school course is rigorous enough, or if the teacher has the appropriate credentials to oversee a post-secondary level course, he said. Some students take online courses that don’t require interaction with their high school teachers, and pass/fail final exams aren’t always required.
“There’s too much focus on butts in seats and the system payments,” Horn told The Epoch Times. “My biggest concern is that [dual-enrollment courses] could be a bridge to nowhere for so many students.”
Many high schools offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses and dual-enrollment programs, and often they are competing options. While AP courses don’t count as college credits, they often carry more weight on a college application, especially for more competitive institutions.
Celeste Summers, who attended high school in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said dual-enrollment courses in her district had a reputation as being easy, and the asynchronous online college classes “stimulate the temptation to cheat.”
“The more dual-credit courses one takes, the fewer high school classes remain, meaning that the amount of teacher-student connection is lessened considerably,” Summers wrote in a March 2024 article for North Carolina-based James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Horn said high school advisors and guidance counselors can do more to help students navigate their options and inform them whether and how dual-enrollment credits will transfer to the colleges or trade schools they’re considering.
The most selective public flagship universities and elite private schools are in a position to reject transfer credits from dual enrollment programs, but that’s not the case for most higher learning institutions across the nation, public or private. With fewer students to go around in the years to come and many colleges already struggling financially, market forces will play a role in opening doors for students who expect their credits to transfer, Horn said.
“It’s a dynamic to watch over the next several years,” he told The Epoch Times.
Even though the median amount of time for completing a bachelor’s degree in the 2024–2025 academic year was 3.7 years for a bachelor’s and 3.0 years for an associate’s degree, 13.5 percent of bachelor’s earners needed seven years or more to complete their programs, as did about one-quarter of those enrolled in associate’s or certificate programs, according to an Oct. 1 report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
John Fink, program lead at the CCRC, told The Epoch Times that strong growth trends in Texas and California should help set a national participation record for dual enrollment this academic year, especially since the Lone Star State has now implemented a program that fully funds such courses for low-income students.
In a recent study across four states, Fink found that students who completed dual-enrollment courses in high school finished a bachelor’s degree program up to seven months sooner than their peers who did not, with the average time for students in the latter category taking between 4.1 and 4.4 years.
“So given that it is common for completers to take longer than two or four years to complete a two- or four-year degree [respectively], these findings suggest to me that a key benefit of dual enrollment may be in helping more students complete on time,” he said.
