Katherine L. Hughes is the Assistant Director for Work and Education Reform Research at the Community College Research Center (CCRC), Teachers College, at Columbia University. Her recent work focuses on the potential of credit-based transition programs (such as dual enrollment) for preparing youth for college. Previous research projects have centered on the national school-to-work initiative, employer involvement in high schools, work-based learning, the restructuring of New York City’s vocational high schools, and career academies. Dr. Hughes’ research has increasingly focused on state policies, in particular examining how such policies influence the high school to college transition and access to college generally. In early November, Catherine Kirby, UPDATE Editor, conducted this interview with Dr. Hughes.

UPDATE: In a 2006 CCRC publication, "Pathways to College Access and Success," you and your co-authors discussed Credit-Based Transition Programs (CBTBs) such as the International Baccalaureate (IB), dual enrollment, Tech Prep, and middle college high schools – strategies that aid the transition from high school to college. The IB has long been associated with academically well-prepared students whose transition to college is typically smooth relative to students whose high school achievement is not as high. What has your research shown that administrators and policy-makers should keep in mind as they develop or implement these transition programs for middle- and low-achieving students?

Dr. Hughes: In that study we particularly looked at programs that were trying to broaden their student population to include students who were middle or low achieving or under represented in college in different ways. The IB program we looked at was one of those. Yes, IB is typically known as a program for very high achieving students who take almost exclusively college courses their junior and senior years. It was interesting to see how this program was trying to open up access, but they weren’t as successful as they hoped because they were having trouble recruiting students into the program, especially minority students. [The target students] didn’t see this program as something for them because they hadn’t previously been included. To encourage the students to see themselves as IB students, the program was working on the ninth and tenth grade curriculum to get them started earlier for preparation for college level courses. So, one thing we learned is that just because you open a program to a broader range of students doesn’t mean the students will come. You need an active recruitment strategy that includes a lot of encouragement and preparation so that students feel they will be able to succeed.

UPDATE: In that same study you discovered some promising program features that enable student success. Could you say a bit about them?

Dr. Hughes: We found some very interesting and promising support services for students in another form of CBTB - dual enrollment programs. In those, high school students are also considered to be college students and thus, often have a college ID which they can use to access college services in addition to the services their high school offers. That is seen as a big advantage in terms of having access to services like tutoring, computing, writing workshops, counseling, financial aid counseling, transfer counseling – all of the things that colleges typically provide. If high school students can familiarize themselves with those services and use them, then they’ll have a big step ahead when they come to the campus later on. We found that to be very promising.

We contrasted the dual enrollment model [with the advantage of having a college ID as a result of enrollment in a dual credit course] with the credit-in-escrow model associated with tech prep programs. With credit-in-escrow, students take courses at the high school that will eventually yield college credit for them, if they go on to the participating college and request the credit be counted toward their college transcript. Students taking credit-in-escrow courses are not officially considered to be college students and so do not have that kind of access to the campus and its services that you would see in dual enrollment programs. There is some general acknowledgement that that has been a failed model because most students don’t ever see their credits; they change their minds in terms of what they want to study or where they want to go to college. But with the dual enrollment model, the high school student is completing college level work and upon completion of the course has generated credit immediately on a college transcript.

In addition to outreach, active recruitment, and availability of student support services, the other thing we cited was curriculum aligned between the high school and the community college in the form of curricular pathways. Within these pathways, there are many options for course taking. We’ve seen partnerships between community colleges and high schools that don’t just offer college credit courses, but offer developmental courses and college preparatory courses – a range of activities that, again, support students starting in the tenth grade so that they can be prepared to take college courses when they reach their senior year. So, depending on the students’ level, there are many options that they can take advantage of that will hopefully eventually lead to a college credit course in their senior year. Again, the programs can include students of a wide range of abilities. This is not about just offering college credit courses to the top students the spring semester of their senior year. But rather, having a deeper program and a broader range of opportunities and options for all students.

Finally, we also talk a lot about data collection and the benefits associated with having data about these programs. Unfortunately, we found that there wasn’t a lot of data being collected. It is really important to be looking at data from these programs in order to see if they’re having their intended affects and also determine how they can be improved. No, or even poor, data makes program evaluation difficult.

UPDATE: To track some student transition data requires sharing data across systems that often are not connected. Have you found any examples where states are doing a good job of overcoming the barriers of sharing information between secondary and postsecondary levels within the many states that lack a shared data system?

Dr. Hughes: In California, there’s the Cal-PASS system, funded by multiple foundations, where school districts and colleges can voluntarily send their data. The Cal-PASS administrators store and manage data from multiple regions across the state. But usually we’re disappointed when we ask people about data they are collecting. It’s certainly in everybody’s minds right now. You can’t go to a conference or meeting without people talking about data, and, of course, it ties into all the national discussion on accountability. We work in several states through the Ford Foundation’s Bridges to Opportunity project which has not only been encouraging states to create better secondary and postsecondary data systems and connect them but also for people to understand research and how data from research can be used to inform policy decisions at the state level. I know several states now that are in the process of trying to put this all together, which is often very expensive and difficult, but possible.

UPDATE: Data systems are not the only important systems that must be better aligned if educational organizations are to improve the transition from high school to college. In a 2002 report entitled "What Role can Dual Enrollment Programs Play in Easing the Transition between High School and Postsecondary Education?" prepared for the Office of Vocational and Adult Education, U.S. Department of Education, you and your co-authors mention the “significant break between high school and college” that we have in the U.S. education system. Part of that break is embodied in the lack of coordination between high school exit and college entrance standards. What is being done to address this?

Dr. Hughes: The problem is a lack of standardization within states. For example, there are states in which community colleges are using several different college placement exams, and even those using the same test sometimes set different cutoff scores. If the colleges themselves have different standards for what college readiness means, then how can high schools and districts and the state’s secondary education system determine what their exit criteria should be? Our history of locally controlled education really works against [standardization], although some states are doing it. In Florida now, all of the colleges must use the same placement exam, so you could say in Florida that there is a statewide standard for what college readiness means. With that in place, the K-12 system can work to make sure that students are ready and can pass that standard when students get out of high school. I know this is something that the America Diploma Project, sponsored by Achieve, has been working on, and I can’t tell you how many reports are on my desk that basically recommend the alignment of high school exit standards and college entrance standards – but it’s just coming about very slowly. New York City took a step towards alignment after the state imposed the Regents Exams for all high school students. The Regents Exams have existed for a long while, but they hadn’t before been required of all high school students. When they did, the City University of New York system [CUNY] said that if the students got a certain score on their Regents that would be an indicator that they were ready to enter CUNY. Now, the exit score is not the same as the CUNY entrance score. You can just pass the Regents (with a low score) and still not be considered college ready; the entrance score is a little bit higher than the exit score. And, there are some states that are starting to use the ACT as students’ high school exit examination and with it, the public postsecondary institutions are using that score as a measure of college readiness criteria.

UPDATE: That gap between high school exit measures and college entrance requirements is exposed in the high rate of remediation seen at the community college. What has your research uncovered that shows some promise to lower the remediation rate?

Dr. Hughes: It’s a huge problem and we don’t have a lot of good evidence on what works. We see a lot of students being discouraged because they come to college and think they’re ready to take college credit courses and then are told they are not. They’re spending their money or using their financial aid to take a lot of developmental courses, so this is a huge problem. I know there’s a lot of good research underway that will hopefully start giving us some more clues on the best way to tackle this. It’s hard to say if it’s really due to anything going on in the class or if it’s due to the fact that a lot of students are part time and they have jobs and financial problems.

UPDATE: Of all the credit based transition programs, dual enrollment (often referred to as dual credit) has experienced widespread growth in Illinois as elsewhere in recent years. Not only designed for academic courses, many career and technical dual enrollment courses have been developed for students wishing to explore courses that are being squeezed out of high school curricula for various reasons. What has your research shown about the impact of dual credit courses on the broader range of students who enroll in them?

Dr. Hughes: We just released a new study entitled, “The Postsecondary Achievement of Participants in Dual Enrollment: An Analysis of Student Outcomes in Two States.” It’s the best evidence to date that dual enrollment is having its intended outcomes. We’re excited about it, not just because all of the findings were so positive, but also because of the size of the sample. The largest was from the state of Florida where we looked at all students across the state participating in dual enrollment and a sub sample of students we identified as CTE students. The sample in Florida was large enough that we could look at some sub groups, so we created sub samples of the lower SES students and found that the positive affects for them were larger than the positive affects for the sample as a whole. In addition, we also had a sample of students in the CUNY system in New York City. In NYC, we looked exclusively at students who graduated from the CTE high schools and then went on to CUNY, comparing students who had participated in dual enrollment and students who had not. We were able to control for some student background characteristics and some indicators of socioeconomic status and students’ GPAs as well as other variables.

What we found was similar positive outcomes for the general population and the CTE students. We found that students who were in dual enrollment had a better transition and were more likely to go on to college full time, at 4-year schools instead of 2-year schools. They had higher GPAs after certain time periods. They were more likely to persist in postsecondary education and they certainly accumulated more credits over the course of several semesters than the students who did not participate in dual enrollment. That is a positive outcome and a support for dual enrollment. It’s also support for this expanded eligibility for dual enrollment that we have been writing about in these other reports that you’ve mentioned. Transition programs are designed to help students succeed, and we should work to see that no eligible students are excluded.

UPDATE: Since the inception of dual enrollment programs, your work and that of others have cited skepticism and outright rejection of dual enrollment courses and policy among state- and district-level officials because of financing and equitable funding. It’s nearly 2008; have we addressed this backlash against what has proved to be a popular mechanism that supports student transition to college?

Dr. Hughes: Yes. We’re starting to do some work in California where they strongly prohibit double funding of dual enrollment. As a result, we find that a lot of people in California are just scared to touch it. It does exist in the state, but it’s a big, big issue. There were some scandals a few years ago with the State Department of Finance, which caught colleges doing things fiscally they weren’t supposed to do. It has inspired some fear around the state. Every year a state legislator proposes legislation to institute double funding and it never happens. That does create disincentives around dual enrollment. But we have found some wonderful places where they are offering dual enrollment. Also, when we were doing some work in Michigan, we found that high school districts have to contribute funds to pay the students’ tuition. The high school districts must hand over some money to the colleges where the students are taking their college courses. As you can imagine, would a district leader or principal want students to take college courses or not? They would not; it’s a loss of funds to them. It really creates some disincentives. They understand that, but so far they haven’t been able to change. It’s still a very big issue. On the other hand, Iowa has its own legislation supporting what they call Career Academy programs. Most of us know Career Academy programs as high school based or small learning community programs with a CTE theme. In Iowa they are CTE pathways from the high school to the college that include college credit and often courses that are taken at work sites. Iowa encourages these programs by providing funds so that when high school students choose to enroll in these programs and leave the high school for part of the junior or senior years, the high schools in the district are not losing funds. That certainly contributes to the success of the program. I’m hoping our new report, that shows some positive benefits to students who participate in dual enrollment, will have some influence on the state policy scene. Evidence will help. We’ve already talked about how dual enrollment has been growing like crazy around the country and the number of students participating has really shot up. All of that has been happening in an environment where we really haven’t had very good evidence. People have believed that it is a good thing. We are increasingly getting some evidence, and maybe we’ll see some policy shifts based on that evidence.

UPDATE: In order to implement effective transition programs, we instinctively know that greater and more sophisticated collaborative relationships between high schools and community colleges are needed. Where can we focus our efforts to achieve better collaboration between secondary and postsecondary systems?

Dr. Hughes: A lot of effort needs to be made on the secondary side. We see the effort from the postsecondary side. They’re reaching down into the high schools to try to get the students on their campuses, to try to make sure that the students are ready, to try to recruit the students to come. Just in our own work, we don’t see the equivalent effort on the other side – something about raising the capacity of high schools and districts and raising their awareness of the importance of strong partnerships with postsecondary. In terms of CTE specifically, when secondary CTE programs have had outreach efforts, it has been focused on employers in the business community so that the CTE skills they are teaching are relevant and up-to-date and so they can provide for work based learning opportunities. That’s really been the focus of outreach to the loss of outreach to the postsecondary community. Here in New York City, looking ahead to the new Perkins and all of the school reorganization going on here, there have been some discussions of quality criteria for [secondary] CTE programs and making sure that all CTE programs have strong postsecondary partners and have pathways leading right into local postsecondary schools. State CTE leaders recognize that [secondary CTE programs] have done a good job with outreach to employers, creating partnerships and such, but improvement needs to be made with partnerships between secondary and postsecondary institutions.

UPDATE: Policy regarding dual enrollment varies among districts and among states. Given that dual enrollment is often a contributing structure of the pathway system that is so much a part of Perkins IV implementation and is known to contribute to student transition from high school to college, which policy issues are particularly important for community college administrators and state policymakers to address?

Dr. Hughes: The policy issues that are particularly important go back to student eligibility and access. We’ve shown that students in CTE programs and CTE pathways who take dual enrollment do very well – just as well as non CTE students do. We should make sure that they can be included no matter what their GPA because there still are a few states that set the statewide GPA as eligibility criteria for dual enrollment participation. Florida is one. Statewide, students are supposed to have a 3.0 to participate but if they are taking non-credit CTE courses, they can have a 2.0. We argue that neither of those GPA eligibility requirements should be there. Most states do allow the institutions to set their own criteria. Some colleges do want students to pass their placement tests to make sure that they’re not going to fail. Other institutions have no entry criteria. So, in addition to the access and funding issues are other features. For example, where does the course take place: on the college campus or the high school campus? Those are things that we don’t have a lot of good evidence on. One would think that the students would get more out of it at the college campus, right? You want them to have that taste of college and become oriented to the environment and be among other college students, but we don’t have any real hard and fast evidence yet on whether that is the case. We actually just saw an interesting program in California where the high school had space but the college was running out of space. So the college actually built the whole auto shop at the high school, and the college courses are being taken there. Not only the high school students are using that auto shop to take college courses, but the college has its own night time college students taking classes there because that’s where the space was. That was an interesting model – making use of whatever each institution can contribute to the partnership, implementing collaboration as it was intended.

UPDATE: Using the word collaboration is much easier than implementing it. Building relationships between systems that haven’t worked closely together is difficult. What have you found to help increase both the quantity and the quality of collaboration needed for career pathway programs and credit based transition programs?

Dr. Hughes: A lot of collaboration has happened around creating and sustaining articulation agreements. In California it’s actually in the state educational code that articulation agreements must be made between high school and college faculty – a high school teacher sitting down with a college teacher, working together and going through their curricula and finding the similarities and deciding if there are high school courses that could yield advance standing or college credit. It’s very time consuming, but it has brought about stronger relationships. Instead, you can just do dual enrollment and have the high school students take a college credit earning course. We know with our recent research that it is helping students transition to college.

Editor's Note: Dr. Hughes can be reached at hughes@exchange.tc.columbia.edu.