Hybrid Courses in High School

As dual enrollment takes off for community colleges, Arizona State University partners with hundreds of high schools across the country. Also, has Texas set the gold standard for performance funding? And, ACE’s investment in a new workforce education tech fund.

High School Students Earn ASU Credits

Dual enrollment is booming, particularly at community colleges. More than 1M high school students are taking courses at two-year colleges, and they now comprise nearly one in five community college students.

But don’t sleep on the mega-universities. One of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing dual-enrollment programs is run by Arizona State University. Accelerate ASU has served more than 10K students across 400+ high schools around the country, with annual growth of 58% and a 20% increase in high school partners. 

ASU doesn’t do small. It now enrolls 181K students—including 41K new students this fall—while ASU Online just topped 100K students.

The university’s push to bridge high school and college reflects its commitment to expanding access to higher education at scale, says Patrick Rossol-Allison, associate vice president of strategic initiatives for ASU’s Learning Enterprise, which is focused on lifelong learning.

“We created Accelerate ASU to address significant gaps in the current education system, particularly in dual-enrollment programs, which often favor students already on a college-bound path while excluding those from underserved backgrounds,” Rossol-Allison says.

Dual-enrollment programs give high school students exposure to the professional world through career-focused learning, ASU says. They can also give a boost to workforce development and economic competitiveness in a local region.

Yet many schools face challenges in developing these programs, says Rossol-Allison, particularly with funding, staffing, and transportation. And while 35 states fund colleges for dual-enrollment programs, according to a new report from the ACCT Center for Policy and Practice, financial gaps are a problem even in states that cover some of the cost of offering them.

Rossol-Allison says ASU’s approach is designed to minimize those barriers, in part by tapping the university’s scale to offer sustainably priced dual-enrollment courses.

“ASU collaborates with high schools to ensure that students are engaged in rigorous, relevant coursework that prepares them for college success,” he says. “We leverage ASU’s extensive hybrid resources to provide flexible learning experiences that can be personalized to meet the needs of individual students.”

High schools can choose from three models when they partner with the university:

• Facilitated—A teacher guides students through the course during scheduled class time, with hybrid content.

• Supervised—An academic coach or teacher monitors students as they complete courses at their own pace.

• Individual—Students take courses independently, outside of school hours.

Students and their families pay nothing under the first two approaches. Partner high schools pay $250 per student, which Rossol-Allison says is significantly less than many dual-enrollment programs, which can run from $500 to $2K per student. For students who participate in Accelerate ASU outside of high school, the cost is $25 to register and $400 to convert college credits.

To de-risk the courses for students, ASU lets them decide whether or not to include their grades on a college transcript. Students also can retake courses before adding them to a transcript.

The program offers high schools a range of options for how many dually enrolled credits to offer, from 12 credits focused on career and college readiness up to 60 credits, enough for a student to apply for an ASU-issued associate degree.

To give students a chance to boost their employability, ASU offers career certificates along with dual-enrollment credits, including credentials from Google and AWS, as well as its own certificates. 

“Certifications are a key part of ASU Learning Enterprise’s broader mission to serve learners at every stage of life,” Rossol-Allison says.

ASU’s high school partners stretch from Hawaii to New York, with an intentional focus on underserved communities. For example, roughly 300 students have enrolled through Washington’s Yakima School District, where many students are from lower-income families.

Policy is a key lever for influencing the success and reach of dual-enrollment programs, says Rossol-Allison. He points to significant challenges caused by the variability of policies across states, particularly in funding models, credit transferability, and eligibility requirements. And Rossol-Allison calls on states not to restrict dual enrollment to a limited group or single college providers.

The Kicker: “It’s essential for achieving impact at scale,” Rossol-Allison says. “No single entity can do it alone.”

The State Funding Formula to Watch

Texas may have set the gold standard on how to pay for community colleges, one well-placed expert told me this week, in part because of how the state’s new outcomes-based funding formula has changed conversations on its two-year campuses.

Work Shift covered the proposal as HB 8 was emerging, with particular attention to how Texas has sought to prioritize “credentials of value” and the economic gains of students. This week, reporter Colleen Connolly goes deep with a look at how the law has been implemented and what it has meant for Texas community colleges.

Almost all state support (95%) now is tied to student outcomes, up from 10%. The formula incorporates metrics on transfer and dual enrollment, among others, with extra money for enrolling low-income and adult learners.

The policy also featured big funding increases, Connolly reports, with many community colleges getting bumps of 50% or more in state support. And as other states have done with their takes on outcomes-based funding, the law was designed to be more carrot than stick—just one district had flat funding this year.

For example, Grayson College got an additional $1.1M in performance-based funding in the first year since law went into effect, reversing a decline in state support. 

The formula has helped the college get ahead of the curve to prepare students to work in semiconductor fabrication facilities, according to Jeremy McMillen, Grayson’s president, even as the fabs are being built near the campus, in northeast Texas. 

Under the old model, the college wouldn’t have “seen funding from the growth in enrollment for two or three years,” McMillen told Connolly. Getting state funding faster is crucial for the two-year college, which spent $1M on equipment alone to train semiconductor technicians.

Much work remains on the formula’s details, however, including how to define and track the value of credentials. Experts say that process could take years.

The policy also has been dinged for not adequately accounting for how students fare in the job market. For example, Michael Bettersworth, senior vice chancellor and chief marketing officer at Texas State Technical College, hesitates to call HB 8 an outcomes-based funding model, because it retains a focus on credential attainment and incentives for student enrollment.

Even so, a growing number of policymakers and community college leaders view the state as the frontier of community college funding—and will be watching as the formula’s impacts come into focus. 

ACE’s Investment in a Workforce Fund

JFFVentures recently launched a new impact venture fund in workforce education. It invests in emerging technologies that are focused on the future of work and workforce development, and which seek to enable economic advancement.

The fund has an unusual investor: the American Council on Education, which is higher education’s umbrella organization. The move is a logical extension for the group’s mission and strategic priorities, says Ted Mitchell, ACE’s president. Mitchell says it also taps into his previous experience as the CEO of a venture philanthropy that invests in K-12 innovation.

“We are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to form partnerships across and outside the higher education sector to help our institutions spur student success and economic and social mobility—and serve as a gateway to in-demand jobs and careers,” Mitchell says.

ACE has its fingers on the pulse of connections between education and the workforce, he says, in part through its work with military and workplace college credit recommendations. And Mitchell says all roads that lead to student success and the “confirmation to individuals of the value of postsecondary education” are rooted in the combinations of ways colleges work with other actors, including some of the startups JFFVentures backs.

“We want to link degrees to jobs and noncompleters back to institutions and then on to jobs,” he says. “That is a powerful way to validate the value of a higher education.”

Open Tabs

College ROI
Postcollege earnings have tilted toward wealthier students since the ’60s, as the wage premium for lower-income students has been cut in half, finds a new working paper. Lower-income students have become less likely to enroll in four-year institutions while seeing relative declines in the value of public universities they attend. They also have become less likely to earn degrees in computer science and other high-value majors than wealthier students.

Pessimistic Grads
More than half (57%) of this year’s college seniors are pessimistic about starting their careers, a substantial increase compared to last year’s class, according to a survey conducted by Handshake. However, strong majorities said college contributed substantially to their ability to secure a meaningful (72%) and well-paying (68%) job. Respondents were skeptical about whether generative AI will create jobs (19%) or make hiring more equitable (17%).

Earn and Learn
Apprenticeships grew by 11% in California during the last five years, according to a new report from Jobs for the Future. The biggest increases were in manufacturing, healthcare, cosmetology, and IT. However, with roughly 94K apprentices, the state has a long way to go to hit Governor Gavin Newsom’s goal of 500K apprentices by 2029. The report said sustainable funding and employer engagement are top barriers to growth.

AI Tools
A new AI-powered career development tool from CareerVillage is aimed at underrepresented students and jobseekers. Ten organizations will try the Coach tool, including workforce boards, Per Scholas and Generation.org, and the University of Florida’s College of Nursing. Also, Cengage Group launched an AI-powered student assistant, which is embedded in Cengage’s online learning platform and will be offered this fall to 5K college students.

Noncredit Microcredentials
While colleges are increasingly interested in alternative credentials, higher education lacks consistent processes for developing and pricing noncredit, short-term credentials, according to UPCEA. The group’s new playbook for accelerating growth in the space includes case studies on the development of noncredit microcredentials by 10 universities, which represent a wide range of sizes, geographies, and institution types.

Funds and Gifts
GitLab Foundation, Ballmer Group, and OpenAI are launching a second round of a fund aimed at fostering AI innovation among nonprofit organizations.

Credential Engine is inviting sponsors to back the fifth edition of its Counting Credentials Report, which will be released next year.

Job Moves
Jeff Bulanda has been named vice president of the new ASA Center for Career Navigation at JFF. He previously was a senior manager for Amazon’s Career Choice.

Thanks for reading. As a busy summer winds down, let me know what I’ve missed? —PF