Early-college high schools are those that fully incorporate college course-taking into the curriculum. They are not to be confused with a more-typical “dual enrollment” model, which allows students the opportunity to take college courses if they have time. Early college schools bake in college attendance (and almost always in person in university lecture halls and science labs) as part of the four-year high school experience. In general, they do this by accelerating traditional high school coursework to allow students as much time as possible to attend postsecondary classes—and hopefully earn transferrable credits—before graduation. The model is new enough to still be the subject of pilot-program-style research but old enough to have a significant amount of longitudinal data informing that research. A new report from the American Educational Research Association journal, examining the early-college model’s impact on college degree attainment, illustrates the point.
This report is the second follow-up on students who first entered high school almost twenty years ago. My colleague Aaron Churchill reviewed the first published research in 2013, and some of the same analysts led this successor study. The sample for the original early-college impact study consisted of students who participated in admission lotteries offered by a set of ten early-college schools in five states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Ohio) and who entered ninth grade between 2005 and 2007. Treatment group students were those who applied for a school’s ninth-grade lottery and were offered a spot in one of the schools (n= 1,028); control group students were those who applied but were not offered a spot (n=1,360).
The original study, using an intent-to-treat model, was published in 2013 and found higher rates of high school graduation—and college enrollment within two years of graduation—among students admitted to an early-college school. The first follow-up study, using the same methodology and published in 2021, found that early-college admittees had significantly higher rates of associate degree completion (29.3 percent vs. 11.1 percent) and bachelor’s degree attainment (30.1 percent vs. 24.9 percent) than their non-admitted peers within six years of expected high school graduation.
And now the newest study follows up again with the same students ten years after graduation. It uses the same methodology as before but excludes fifty-seven of the original subjects due to a change in data access from one state’s department of education. The impact of early college school admittance on postsecondary degree completion was still statistically significant over the longer term, though it was greatly decreased. Treatment group students were 8.5 percentage points more likely to have earned a postsecondary degree by year ten than control group students. The results for associate degree completion were roughly similar to the overall results. The impacts of early-college admission on bachelor’s degree completion, however, were no longer significantly different between the two groups after year four. For master’s degree completion, the statistical difference ended after year six. Impacts on Black and Hispanic students in the treatment group were higher across the board than for their White and Asian counterparts. Interestingly, the strongest impacts on associate degree completion were among the highest-achieving middle school students (as determined by eighth grade test scores), indicating that the most-prepared students in early-college schools were able to fully or nearly complete their associate degrees before leaving high school. The bottom line: Early-college students attained degrees at a higher rate and faster pace than control students for nearly a decade after graduation.
This would appear to be the end of the road for this particular line of research regarding degree attainment, although it might be instructive to try and replicate the effort with more-recent cohorts of students. In the nearly two decades since the students in this study entered high school, the early college movement has expanded to more schools, new models, and other states. It’s time to move the impact research on to those new pastures. However, there is likely still data to be mined from these original subjects in terms of career pathways and earnings trajectories.
SOURCE: Mengli Song et al., “Accelerated Postsecondary Pathways: The Longer-Term Impact of the Early College High School Model on Postsecondary Degree Attainment,” American Educational Research Association (September 2024).
