College-School Partnerships Offer Head Start on Higher Education

The most recent Education Department tally found more than 800,000 dual-enrolled students in the 2002-03 school year.

This school year, 1,994 students in Northern Virginia schools are taking NVCC classes, up from 516 when the program started in 2005. Almost 430 Montgomery County students are enrolled in Montgomery College classes offered in their high schools. In the District, some students take classes for free at the University of the District of Columbia and other local colleges.

In some programs, high school students travel to a college campus. In others, college professors come to the high school, or high school teachers, typically required to have an advanced degree in the subject area, lead the class.

Students typically must pass community college entrance exams and have a minimum grade point average. Some pay full tuition; in other cases, the fee is reduced or the high school pays.

Part of the point is to give teenagers a taste of the college workload.

Cassie Velez, 19, a freshman at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, started with 10 credits she earned at Gaithersburg High School in Montgomery. She's living with her grandmother to keep costs down.

Two of the college classes she took in high school, criminal justice and anthropology, count toward her major. Just as important, she said, were lessons learned about study skills, motivation and time management. Her Montgomery College professors expected her to come prepared. There was no slowing down, and few reminders were given about assignments.

"There was no special treatment," Velez said. "I learned hard. I would come to class sometimes, and I hadn't even looked at the syllabus and realized we had a reading that day."

Some programs have shown promise. In a study of dual enrollment students in Florida, researchers from Teachers College at Columbia University found that they were more likely to go to college full time and had higher grades in college compared with peers with similar backgrounds.

Melinda Mechur Karp, one of the study's authors, said the findings suggest that schools should expand such programs. But, she said, schools must help struggling students handle the workload. "You certainly run the risk of taking a 16-year-old and putting an 'F' on their college transcript, and that's not where we want to go, either," she said.

Brett Promisloff and her classmates in Introduction to Engineering Design at Gaithersburg High have been hard at work on final projects. Her team is building a remote-control boat to ferry Ping-Pong balls across a lake and drop them in a Hula-Hoop.

Students cover the same material and take the same tests as peers on campus. A Montgomery College professor teaches the class.

"You can't slack off on anything," Promisloff said. "Everything we do counts. You have to focus more and really pay attention."