As dual enrollment grows, community colleges and 4-year institutions compete for the same students

More and more Arizona high school students are taking part in dual enrollment programs.

Maricopa Community Colleges says it had nearly 28,000 dual enrollment students during the 2024-25 school year. By way of full disclosure, KJZZ is licensed to the Maricopa Community College District.

Helios Education Foundation is reporting an increase in participation across the state, as well.

Dual enrollment generally allows high school students to take college classes — and earn college credit. And in some places, it’s becoming so popular that four-year colleges and universities are starting to offer the program.

Scott Carlson with the Chronicle of Higher Education has written about increasing dual enrollment, and he joined The Show to talk more.

Scott Carlson

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The Chronicle of Higher Education

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Scott, for those who aren't familiar with the concept of dual enrollment, what exactly is it?

SCOTT CARLSON: Dual enrollment is this construction that has sort of popped up across the country in different forms in different states. But it's basically a situation where students in high school can step away from high school courses and take college courses for credit either in their high school or at the college campus. It's different in different settings.

It's not always called dual enrollment. Sometimes it's called college and high school, sometimes it's called concurrent enrollment. But that's basically the structure.

And it was founded for a couple of different reasons. One is to give students some sort of sense of what college is going to be like. The other goal of dual enrollment at some level is to offer these courses at a reduced rate or a lower cost. Sometimes they're free and so the student is able to knock down college credits while still in high school at this lower price point. And that gives them a head start in their college journey.

MARK BRODIE: And typically, as you report, high schools have worked with community colleges and other sort of non-four-year colleges and universities to offer these classes. But that seems like it's changing?

SCOTT CARLSON: Well, it was sort of conceived as a community college project. I mean, dual enrollment is where the community colleges have been able to support their enrollments by bringing these students in, but with that sort of promise that the community college is an open access kind of institution and it allows the students to experiment.

And it's typically lower cost. You're in class, courses with students that are also sort of trying out college in their own way. So the community college was sort of the natural place where dual enrollment would grow up or become a thing.

But what you find now is a lot of four-year institutions that are entering the dual enrollment space where they're able to and compete for those students. Because of course, in this environment in America right now with colleges, so many colleges are seeking students to create a pipeline for tuition, which they need to stay afloat.

MARK BRODIE: Are there particular fields of study that you're seeing four-year colleges and universities trying to enter in the dual enrollment space?

SCOTT CARLSON: Not in particular. I mean, I think one of the things that colleges are trying to do is go at the prerequisites that students would be taking in those first couple of years of college.

There are instances where, where high schools are playing into kind of a CTE, or a career and technical education environment, or that kind of programming that's all about helping students who come from lower income backgrounds get into high demand fields, areas where we really need workers: cybersecurity, nursing and so on.

MARK BRODIE: What kind of impact is it having on community colleges that four-year institutions are starting to get into this?

SCOTT CARLSON: Well, I mean, for community colleges, this is a major source of enrollment and has been really since the pandemic and maybe even before. There's some community colleges where 50% of the enrollment is dual enrollment. They've been able to float the boat on high school students.

So for community colleges, this is extremely important, a very important pipeline of students that they would end up recruiting over time — in a lot of cases, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases.

So naturally the four-year institutions are going to look at that and say, "Why can't we capture that market ourselves? Why can't we go for that?"

In some cases they're barred from that or there are barriers to them. For example, in Colorado, what is called dual enrollment is called concurrent enrollment there. And it's really reserved for the community colleges. If you're going to do dual enrollment at a four-year institution, you have to pay for it as a student or as a family.

So there are barriers there for the four-year institutions, but they're trying to work around that to get access to that pipeline of students.

MARK BRODIE: I mean, is there enough of a pool of students for both community colleges and four-year colleges to really have successful, thriving, robust dual enrollment programs?

SCOTT CARLSON: Not in some parts of the country, no. In some parts of the country, in the Northeast, in the upper Midwest, for example, you're seeing this demographic decline. So the numbers of students that are coming out of high school are going to be dropping over the next couple of decades.

So that's a shrinking pool of traditional students that these four-year and two-year institutions would be going for, and now they have to seek out other sorts of populations. High school populations, going for the students that are before college is one of those areas that they're trying to exploit.

The other area that a lot of colleges are looking for is the adult population. So students who went to college, knocked down some credits but never finished, what's the possibility of there are bringing those students back in and allowing them to finish?

MARK BRODIE: One of the things that's so interesting about this happening now is that in Arizona, very recently the state allowed community colleges to offer four-year degrees. So on the one hand, you have community colleges starting to do what four-year colleges traditionally had done, and then you also now have four-year colleges starting to do what community colleges had traditionally done.

SCOTT CARLSON: Yes. I mean, to some extent this is mission creep, right? It's the institutions trying to find these other avenues to get students. It's also to some extent a function of the institutions trying to play to their mission and trying to help out the local economy.

So the four-year programs that are popping up at community colleges, often that's popping up because they are in areas of desperate need for workers — so nursing and cybersecurity, these other sort of direct to job kinds of programs. And the thirst, the hunger for those kinds of workers is just so high that the four-year institutions just can't serve the capacity. So more of the state policymakers and state higher education boards are turning to the two-year institutions as an option for that.

Again though, there are wars between institutions or different types of institutions at some sort of subtle level in the sense that this does again though play to what these institutions need, which is bodies for tuition which help to support the college itself.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so how do you see this all playing out?

SCOTT CARLSON: Well, I mean, I see this continuing to be an area of competition. The fact that the states and the state higher education boards need to sort of figure out the rules around this is important for the students themselves and the consumer protection that the students need because transfer is always one of the big issues when it comes to coming out of transferring out of community college, right.

And you don't want to complicate that process even more by, by making this college and high school process not clear, not set up, not with a robust set of rules around how it's going to work for the student.

MARK BRODIE: Do you get the sense that policymakers are aware of some of these issues that they need to start to think about?

SCOTT CARLSON: So I think policymakers do need, do feel that they need to deal with this. But there are so many intense interests on the part of the institutions, which are powerful lobbying organizations. So how do you mete this out among all of these different institutions? It ends up being a headache for a lot of these policymakers in different states, but it's an issue that they're going to have to hammer out.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Scott Carlson with the Chronicle of Higher Education. Scott, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

SCOTT CARLSON: Thanks, Mark.