A partnership between the Rancho Santiago Community College District and the Orange Unified School District provides students, particularly students from traditionally underserved backgrounds, the opportunity to earn transferable college credits while still in high school.
The RSCCD’s Dual Enrollment program, also referred to as Early College, allows students to take community college classes taught by college instructors.
Dual Enrollment offers many benefits, said Jason Parks, vice president of Academic Affairs for Santiago Canyon College.
In a presentation to the RSCCD board of trustees recently, Parks informed the board that OUSD students in middle/high school who were enrolled in dual enrollment have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by not going directly to UCLA and millions of dollars by not going directly to USC.
Most importantly, Parks said, Dual Enrollment is about reaching those high school students who believe college is unattainable for a variety of reasons, especially their backgrounds.
“There’s a lot of kids out there that don’t know how to (get into) college, if you will,” Parks said. “It’s not something that their family talks about. Maybe their parents didn’t go to college. Oftentimes they’re immigrants. That’s where my heart is. So often I’ve heard students use the phrase, ‘college isn’t for people like me,’ and that’s just sort of crushing to somebody who works at a college to hear those words.”
In an op-ed penned by California Community College Chancellor Sonya Christian and George R. Boggs, president and CEO emeritus of the American Association of Community Colleges, the educators wrote that dual enrollment is one strategy that can be used to address the challenges of a growing skills gap and inequity in the workforce.
The op-ed was published in April in “Diverse: Issues in Higher Education,” a news site covering higher education.
“Establishing and expanding dual enrollment programs is a place to begin,” Christian and Boggs wrote. “The California community colleges focus on equitable access by calling for all ninth graders to take at least a one-credit college course in which they explore potential careers and develop a preliminary college education plan that includes a minimum of 12 college credits during high school.”
Dual enrollment is also a way to introduce students to college in “kind of a low stakes environment,” Parks said.
Students who might otherwise have to work full-time right out of high school and not have the time to attend college are perfect candidates for dual enrollment.
“We’re giving them that opportunity to say, ‘Hey, college is a thing I can do,’ ” Parks said.
Dual Enrollment also gives students the chance to build skills needed in the workforce, he said.
Students in the dual enrollment program are not required to take a certain number of college classes.
Some have earned college credits by taking a single class and others have taken as many as 10 college-credit courses, Parks said.
Some students from the 2024 graduating classes from Orange Unified earned 53 units, saving $74,424, compared to the published price of those courses at UCLA, Parks said.
While SCC offers a portfolio of classes specifically for dual enrollment students, those students have access to every class.
Students enrolled in the dual enrollment program can take the classes at their respective high schools, at the Santiago Canyon College campus, or online.
SCC staff members also have office hours at each high school in the district.
Equitable dual enrollment is a key component of “Vision 2030” a matrix for providing “focus, equity, and direction to California’s 116 community colleges, which serve two million students.
“Vision 2030 focuses on the students and future learners impacted by increasing income inequality and poverty,” the Vision 2030 report states. “These include veterans, people with low incomes, K-12 dual-enrollment students, foster youth, and students who are justice-involved or justice-impacted.”
Vision 2030 envisions a system of higher education more inclusive of all Californians, ensuring access points for every learner across race, ethnicity, region, class and gender, Christian wrote.
The initiative offers a pathway, with tailored support and exit points to transfer or complete a community college baccalaureate or obtain a job with family-sustaining wages,” the chancellor said.
“I am excited that Vision 2030 reexamines what access means when we lead with equity,” the chancellor wrote. “When students cannot find their way to college, it is our responsibility to bring college to them.”
