As the president of a small college in the Rust Belt, Jill Murray feels the crush of enrollment pressures. Her institution, Lackawanna College, has a plan to ease them: It’s starting the pipeline earlier by tapping into Pennsylvania’s 502 school districts.
Lackawanna’s dual-enrollment system is a recruitment tool. It offers college-level courses at $100 per credit — an 80-percent discount — to about 3,000 high-school students, giving them some sense of what majors and career tracks they might pursue at the college.
“So many students have no idea what’s out there,” Murray says. “We have partnerships with over 80 school districts and growing, and we’re going after all 502 if we can figure that out.”
In Pennsylvania, parents pay tuition for dual-enrollment courses, and Lackawanna’s lower price point offers a lure. Credits earned in high school transfer into a Lackawanna undergraduate program, which eases the transfer process and further enhances the program’s appeal.
Dual enrollment — sometimes called concurrent enrollment, among other names — is traditionally associated with community colleges, which can draw half or more of their enrollment from high schools. But four-year institutions — including flagships — are entering those spaces, too, seeking to reach underserved students and help meet enrollment goals. These programs vary, shaped by each state’s competitive landscape and structures for dual enrollment, and the outcomes for students can depend on the guardrails set up by local policymakers. Sometimes students are drawn to brand-name institutions and away from community colleges, where courses are often more transferable.
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Notes and links on dual enrollment.
Credit for non Madison School District Courses