Dual Enrollment: Universities digging their own financial grave?
Dual enrollment is a fantastic deal for students. Get 30–40 college credits in high school at a massive discount, show up at a university basically as a sophomore, and graduate in three years.
But for universities? The math doesn’t add up.
We heavily subsidize these credits ($75 per course or in some cases free) while public institutions in the same state compete for high schools because everyone wants the enrollment and credit hours used to divvy up state support. Then those same students arrive on campus needing 30–40 fewer credits.
It’s like an ice cream shop handing out huge free samples, celebrating how many samples it distributed, and then wondering why everyone is ordering smaller cones.
At my university, the Provost’s office is pushing departments hard to expand dual enrollment. I keep asking about the long-term financial consequences for our university. The response is basically a shrug and, “Well, everyone else is doing it.”
We’ve essentially created a system where universities compete to sell their future tuition revenue early and at a huge discount.
And this is happening while universities are already staring at an enrollment cliff and a shrinking pool of traditional students. Students arriving with a year of college completed means fewer credit hours, lower course enrollments, and less tuition revenue.
The defense is that dual enrollment gets more students into college. Maybe. But at least in my state, I haven’t seen evidence that its massive expansion is producing enough new college students to offset the credits we’re giving away to students who were going to college anyway. In fact, the percentage of dual-enrollment students who subsequently attend our state institutions has been declining (they are probably going to higher ranked out of state universities).
Dual enrollment may be great public policy. But aggressively expanding it while complaining about declining enrollment is a little like digging the hole and then acting surprised that you’re underground.