NACEP Report: Promoting Quality

NACEP Helps States Assess Strategies that Promote Quality Dual Enrollment
New Report Documents Oversight Practices in Six Experienced States

Promoting Quality: State Strategies for Overseeing Dual Enrollment Programs documents the strategies that six states employ to ensure that college courses offered to high school students are of the same high quality and rigor as courses offered to matriculated college students. The report also highlights the main approaches used by these states to encourage colleges and universities to align their dual enrollment programs with state and national quality standards.

Across the country, legislative and policy changes have led to rapid expansion of dual enrollment programs in recent years – providing high school students the opportunity to take college classes in order to simultaneously earn both high school and college credit. This report will help states identify ways to ensure the quality of these courses, a necessary factor to achieving states’ goals to raise the rigor of the high school experience, increase access to college for students who are underrepresented in higher education, reduce the amount of remedial college coursework, and increase college completion rates.

While twenty-nine states have adopted quality standards for post-secondary providers of dual enrollment, few have developed systems to encourage and monitor colleges’ progress toward meeting those standards. Up until now, state policymakers have had limited information on practices in other states when designing or redesigning dual enrollment oversight systems.

Case studies included in the report describe strategies utilized by state agencies in Florida, Illinois, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Virginia. These agencies employ seven main strategies for overseeing dual enrollment programs: program approval, periodic program reviews, student outcome analysis, regular collegial meetings, course approvals, review of district/college agreements, and annual reporting.

Promoting Quality: State Strategies for Overseeing Dual Enrollment Programs was written by NACEP’s Executive Secretary Adam I. Lowe and funded by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education and the Oregon Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development.

October 2010