EP 146: Building Momentum for Innovative Dual Enrollment Pathways Policies

This is In the Know with ACCT, the voice of community college leaders. I'm Kayleigh Woods. The following panel discussion was taken from the building momentum for innovative dual enrollment pathways policy seminar recorded during the 2025 ACCT Leadership Congress in New Orleans, Louisiana. We are joined also by Dr. Mark Sanchez, who is the superintendent president of the Southwestern Community College District. We are also joined again by Dr. Munoz from Long Beach, Ray Martinez from the Texas Association of Community Colleges, Brenda Kays from Kilgore College and Trustee Andrew Hoffman from LA Community College District. This is, I kept telling folks to hold off on some of your questions around teacher training, let's say, or some of the conflicts that have come up around and challenges there. I just want to open up the table to the fact that I think everyone thinks that their state or their locality is unique, which is true. But thinking back on the reforms that your states have pursued in California and Texas, and your experience with implementation, what advice would you give other presidents and trustees as they think about embarking on this work themselves, especially the powerful policy work that both states have pursued? Does anyone just want to, can we jump in with Dr. Sanchez since he's new to the crowd? Thank you for joining us. Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. So the question is, if you're planning to jump in, what advice would I have for people who want to expand C-CAP dual enrollment on their campuses? Yeah, dual enrollment. This is an open, this conversation has been about Texas and California dual enrollment pathways. C-CAP is an example of that. But clearly thinking about 12 or 15 credit career and college pathways, how would folks get involved? And what advice would you have as trustees and presidents think about embarking upon or inserting themselves and policy discussions in their own state? Yeah, one of the things we focused on was getting our UC and our CSU systems involved in that conversation, but also business and industry. So we wanted to start with what the needs were in our local region. So many things are changing in our region with artificial intelligence. It's having a direct impact on our STEM, business and industry, because there's a very significant STEM presence right down the street from the University of California, San Diego and La Jolla. So a lot of their training and their resources are centered on what's called the Mesa or within a mile of the UC San Diego campus. So we engaged, you see in SDSU leadership with what the needs were in the region, mapping out 10 years, of course, in STEM. But we also have a huge manufacturing component because our region is about seven miles from the US, Mexico, border and Tijuana. So we were looking at all of the business and industry needs, not only now, but out 10 years from now, and engaging them on how to drive the legislative changes at the state so that we could start educating. We're actually doing dual enrollment with our middle schools at the seventh and eighth grade level. So the key on building that seventh and eighth grade program was really to get students through that math and that algebra and STEM sequences by the seventh or eighth grade, because we know that's where a lot of our students get stuck. But with business and industry, they really helped drive what the needs were for our region through advisory boards. And we've been able to map out our curriculum from seventh grade leading to those business and industries with our middle schools and our high school partners. So just really having the systematic dialogue with your leadership to map out those needs from the seventh grade level, middle school level, all the way to the university level. And then we did a comprehensive study on that. It's called the University Now Initiative for Southwestern College. It's published on our website, but it was about a two-year study with business and industry UC and CSU leaders to map out what that curriculum looks like. How many trustees are in the room? Okay, good. This is for you. I have a list. So I would say prioritize seamless enrollment process reform. And if Naomi was here, she wouldn't know what I'm talking about. And those of you from California. How many from California are in the room? Okay, good. So you know, we have this CCC apply platform. And so we really need to streamline the way our students are able to enroll in our colleges. And I would say it would be good to have policy on some kind of quick digital enrollment for the student because it's, you know what it's like. It's really hard for students to enroll. So that's number one. And then define clear, well, how many of you have faculty that are unionized in your state? Okay, so a few. Because that's a big barrier actually to dual enrollment. So define clear faculty labor and autonomy boundaries. You know, there are things that our faculty will and will not do. You have to align or try best as possible to align the Bell schedules, figure out extra pay. It gets really complicated. So that's kind of number two. And then manage, do you have FERPA in your state? Is that, that's, okay, that's federal. Yes, of course. So manage the FERPA and data sharing piece of dual enrollment, implement mechanisms to compile college engagement. So when a college within a service area, we have some legislation around this now is unable or unwilling to be able to scale dual enrollment programs. What kind of alternative will there be for the high school district? Align student support with dual enrollment and in the dual systems. And we see this with special education. And so making sure that you're aligned and you're able to meet the needs of the kids that are in special ed. And focus, I think we talked a little bit about this on a low unit stackable career education and transfer pathways. And so that's a lot. It is. But you know, I'm not going to lie, we sit up here and talk about all the benefits and how great dual enrollment is and it is. But it's a lot of work to not only establish, get your agreements in place, but to also keep the program going. And then have a plan for when there are issues and there trust me that there will be issues. And at some point, the trustee gets called. And I've been called on many occasions. Sometimes they're significant. And other times you just need to refer the person to the appropriate person at the college. But issues do occur. So those would be my recommendation. Dr. Case, does any of this resonate with you? It all resonates with me. I believe that as you're moving into a dual credit environment and trying to figure out what that's going to look like at your state, the best council I could give you is to remain flexible and patient. And there's a couple of things that come to mind. And of course it has to do with the partnerships that you already have established with your local ISDs. That's something that you need to continue to hone as you move through this process together. But I know that a lot of people were talking about what does it look like? Actually providing faculty to be in the dual credit arena. We have a model at the college where our faculty actually go out to the ISDs and they're teaching the ISDs. But we have such a demand right now that we're also working with the ISDs in order to see if any of their faculty members actually have the credentials necessary in order to teach a certain class. It's a little bit easier with the career and technical education than what it is with the academic transfer. So I know that one of the things that a lot of colleges are talking about with their ISD partners is a fast track toward credentialing for the ISD faculty. A lot of those teachers that we have in the ISD, they have their bachelor's in teaching. And so what would it look like in order to help them move forward with a master's degree? And how could we partner with the ISDs in order to do that? One of the things that we have put into place is any of the ISD faculty that we hire to help us with the dual credit, those individuals get paid just like any other adjunct would. And the ISDs are not saying pay the ISD, they're allowing us to pay the faculty member directly. And so that has increased interest, as you can imagine, around the faculty members who are at the ISD, who want to be part of the dual credit mission. The other thing I think that we all recognize is that not every college faculty member is cut out to go into a high school classroom and to deliver dual credit. So I think it's also being judicious in terms of who do you send out to be in the dual credit classroom. And we also, because we have such a growth in our dual credit population, as we're hiring, we're thinking about that, because not every faculty member that's in place wants to be a part of the dual credit mission. Now someone said, does that mean that you're reducing your rigor? Absolutely not. So students are still our calling card as they come to the college to finish their degree or transfer to a university or they're going out into the workplace. And so we want to make sure that the rigor remains. But yeah, I think you'd agree that not all personalities are cut out to be in the ISD arena. I think the other thing that we learned, some of it has been the hard way, is the fact that you need to keep an eye on legislation. The Texas legislature actually meets every other year. So it was in 23 is the last time that we met and that was a session that was very good for dual credit as well as for community colleges. But when the 25 session rolled around, there were a couple of curveballs that came our way. One was a piece of K-12 legislation that we didn't even really have our eyes on. And that was the idea that students are no longer allowed to have cell phones with them when they're in the ISD classrooms. Well, that's all fine and good except for the fact that many of our courses have that black board shell and we were using the cell phone for multi-factor authentication. So we had about a month and a half to gather our willies. We did find a software that we could use. We had to implement that. That was a new thing. So that created a lot of drama around the start of the fall semester. But once again, we remained flexible. We remained patient. We sent IT people out to the ISDs in order to help with that. But I think that Ray could also tell you about a piece of legislation that he played some defense in order to make sure that we could be sending our faculty members out to the ISDs to teach courses. Well, thank you, Dr. Kays. Yes. So I'm Ray Martinez. I head up the association in Texas that represents the 50 community colleges throughout the state of Texas. So my perspective is much more in the policy context. I don't have that institutional perspective. I'm privileged to be able to work with CEOs like Dr. Kays to be able to be informed so that when I am the voice at the Texas legislature or at the federal level on behalf of our community colleges, I'm informed by the challenges that we're seeing by institutional leaders like Dr. Kays. And that's an important perspective for me to have. We did have a bill in Texas that was passed this legislative session. The intent of the bill was from the legislature was they wanted to see faculty, quote unquote, back on campus, teaching from campus without realizing the challenges that exist that in Texas, for example, we have community colleges in rural parts of the state who hire instructors and faculty members who need to be able to teach some of those courses remotely because that's how they're going to be able to reach some of those students and ISDs that are in remote and rural parts of the state. And the first iteration of that bill would have negated that. It would have actually said no dual credit instruction that is going to be taught remotely. We had to go do some very quick advocacy and education to the legislature around carving out certain faculty members that have responsibilities like dual credit instruction. We were successful in doing that, but the bill ultimately passed and it does require full time faculty members who don't teach, who teach on campus to teach all of their courses from campus whether they're teaching an online course or not. So it's a challenge that we're working with, but with regard to our dual credit faculty, we were able to get them carved out. I think the only thing that I can offer to this conversation about what to do in moving dual credit further from a policy perspective is going to be the broader picture. So for me, I often get questions from staff members in the legislature in Texas or members themselves. Why are we doing these? What is, how are we connecting the dots with these policy advances that we made like House Bill 8, which was our fundamental change to our funding model in Texas in 2023? Why is this having an impact? And there's different ways to answer that question. From my perspective, one way is to look at data that is already being broadly reported. For example, in 2024, the Luminum Foundation and Gallup released the latest poll numbers on the confidence level that Americans have in the value of higher education credential. And in 2024, what they showed is that one third of respondents, and it's about a 2,000 person survey, so the plus or minus error is maybe in the 3 or 2 percent range, that clearly, that fully one third of Americans who respond to that question said they have absolutely no confidence in the value of a higher education credential. One third said some confidence and one third said a high level of confidence. Fully one third, and that is a change. 10 years prior in 2015, that same Gallup Luminum poll showed that 15 percent of Americans had absolutely no confidence, so that had doubled in a 10 year period. So that should be from a policy perspective, that should be alarming to us. And if you go look at the cohort of that 32 percent who said we have no confidence whatsoever in the value of higher education credential, that's what I cared about. I want to go look at why did they say that? What are the reasons that they gave? That they gave, and it's three reasons. Number one, higher education is too political. Number two, higher education does not teach the skills that we need in today's economy. And number three, higher education is too costly. It's not affordable. Those are the three primary reasons that that 32 percent of Americans said that they have absolutely no confidence in the value of a higher education credential. That ought to inform us as advocates. And quite frankly, I think it ought to inform us as administrators, as campus leaders, as faculty members, as elected in Texas. We elect our trustees and our regions that govern our 50 Community College districts. That ought to inform us. And it ought to concern us. And we ought to make sure that we can articulate back to the decision makers, to the legislature, and state leadership. Here's why what you're doing is making a difference. And from my perspective, the changes that we have made in Texas since 2023, over the past just three or four years, not even that long. To dual credit, for example, to incentivizing transfer, to changing our funding model. All of that speaks to ensuring that we're matching, that we're aligning post-secondary outcomes with the skills that are needed by business and industry. So that addresses number two of the reason why people are saying that, that they have no confidence. And affordability, we've talked about this, we've talked about this in the previous panel for Texas. We created a brand new financial aid program for students who cannot afford to pay tuition to enroll in dual credit programs. That addresses affordability. We're not going to fix the political problem with legislation. Sorry, I can't offer any advice on that one. But we can address two of the three fundamental reasons why Americans are saying they have no confidence whatsoever. So my advice is, we have to connect those dots. Before we can go and really change policy in your states, you have to be able to make the case to the decision-makers. And it doesn't matter what the political leanings of your state is, you have to go and make that case why these changes are so fundamental and how these changes are going to move the needle. And in my opinion, how spell eight and the changes that we've seen, including enhancements to dual credit, access to dual credit, they've been game changers and they're addressing these very issues that I think we're all concerned about irrespective of party affiliation. That was really helpful to get that perspective. I also am struck by the fact that so much of dual credit legislation, dual enrollment legislation across the country is bipartisan. And when we talk about there being, you know, we're at a time that there's great political conflict that we can still come together around certain topics and higher ed that are seen as less controversial or for the common good or that kind of thing. Dr. Munoz, I wanted to give you a chance to share your perspectives around what are some of the lessons that you've learned and that you think will be helpful for the audience as they think about engaging with policymakers around dual enrollment policy. Thank you. You know, I would echo much of what my colleagues have also shared, but I think if I would just go a little deeper, I think it's really important as you're setting up and structuring your dual enrollment model. It's an opportunity to remove barriers. There's a lot of bureaucracy in our systems and I think Trustee Hoffman touched upon that that, you know, whether it's, you know, the forms that they have to complete. And one of the things that we're doing is we see that we spend so much time, almost like the first two weeks of the semester just trying to get everybody enrolled. And I was like, can't we just batch and roll them? And everyone's looking at me like, I'm crazy. And I'm like, you know, I'm pretty sure maybe we can even use AI to write a query that will batch and roll these students and do it with like maybe one, two, three clicks as opposed to, you know, two weeks worth of labor intensive time. And then everyone's like, yeah, you're right. I guess we could just batch and roll them in the courses, you know. So I think it's important to think about as you're structuring in addition to all the things that we're talking about is like, what barriers, either unintentional or intentional that are created that can be removed. Because if you could streamline this, because again, it goes back to the point we talked about earlier that we're trying to do this at a scale, right? So if you're talking full scale, you can't rely on your old ways of thinking around very labor intensive ways of processes. So again, the more that you can automate, the more that you can streamline, the more agreements you can get with the high school partners, the better off you're going to be. So I would just add that point. You also have any strategies you want to share around teacher upskilling so that they can meet credential requirements for teaching college level coursework to high school students. We've been asked from time to time, you know, how can the high school teachers qualify to teach the courses that we're offering? If they meet minimum calls, then they can teach. So they would have to have the minimum qualifications outlined by the academic senate to make sure that they're meeting the qualifications to teach those courses. But again, it's the master's degree issue that we mostly run into. Yeah, so it's, I think we would prefer to have our own faculty teaching. And for me, I feel like students, and this is no, I mean, I know you're in a situation where you have to find other faculty. But if you have the faculty and you have the money to pay your own faculty, I think students get a different experience when they actually are being taught by a faculty member that comes from your institution. And that's just my own personal feeling. We do have faculty at the high schools that are very interested, and of course we'll work with them if they meet the minimum call. And I don't know that Mike, I don't know if you have anything else to add to that. There's a couple of interesting programs that are underway, and they were started in order to actually meet the need of having enough faculty to be in the dual credit arena, but also enough faculty to be in our ISDs. We are seeing this not just at the community college level. We're seeing this at the K-12 level. And so they're doing some interesting work right now around teacher aids and how they're bringing them through to get that baccalaureate degree, including practical experience in the classrooms. And so that seems to be promising as we move forward. And the other thing is just a fast track. Many of you probably already have this, but the idea of five week semesters or five week terms so that the education and training can happen in an expedited method. And yes, I don't take offense to that, but the explosion of dual credit that has come about has made it hard, especially if you're in a rural part of the state. I'm trying to find the individuals who are qualified in order to be out in the dual credit arena. And you can argue this both ways. Yes, could you actually be delivering that remotely? Probably for a portion of the K-12 population, they would succeed well in a remote environment. And a lot of high school students do not prefer the remote environment. They're still trying to get over what happened to them during the pandemic. And they were all forced into that online environment. So I think it's a combination of all of those things as we move forward. And bottom line, this is something I've seen Texas doing and I'm proud of them for doing this. I'm trying to get teacher wages up. And it's the same conundrum that exists with our daycare workers. Who wants to work in a daycare when that is what your wage is? Yet we can't exist as a society without our daycare. So we need to be paying that same attention to our teacher wages. Actually, the conversation figured that I do want to share something, a strategy that we've been implementing and it's still a little nascent, but it's been showing really promising results. So we actually have a rural community in Long Beach on Catalina Island, which is about 30 miles off the coast, is a rural community that is in our district. And it's very difficult, it's about a 40 minute ferry ride to and from. And so the high school reached out and wanted dual enrollment and we had a hard time finding a professor that would be willing to go out there. We also had a hard time finding any of the teachers that met them in qualifications to teach. So what we did is we did a dual enrollment day and we have sociology and Chicano studies and a couple other courses out there. But we teach it synchronously online. And so the instructor, they're in a computer lab. The instructor is on a big TV screen and then the K12 teachers in the class with them. And we're not seeing a difference in our success rates. And so that's a population. There's about 2,000 people that live on the island. I think there's like 400 students in the high school. They have very limited options and they're very much usually the children of the service workers on the island. And so we're really proud of that. And so we're thinking about in some of those hard to fill positions. Like, wouldn't a synchronous, not asynchronous, whereas just online and you're kind of do it at self-paced. But could we use a synchronous model? And I'm going to be a little bit of a geek. I went to dinner last night with Bruce Leite from Apple and he's showing me the Oculus glasses and kind of what they're going to be doing with their content. We could really blow all of this up on dual enrollment. And I just can imagine all these K12 kids with Oculus glasses on and with your professors literally zooming into one of our classes on campus. I don't know. I have all these futuristic little things in my mind about this. I think there's an opportunity to think differently about how we meet that unmet need. Dr. Sanchez, I am curious about, it sounds like you also have a little bit of a rural district or parts of your district or rural. And could you talk about how you all have overcome any of the barriers around bringing populations, rural populations into dual enrollment because we know that that tends to be those populations tend to be underrepresented in dual enrollment. We are a border community. We have a really good working relationship with our Sweetwater Union high school district which is 14 of our high schools that feed directly into the community college. But we also have by national enrollment for students that live in Tijuana. Many of those students are US citizens. And what has caused that dynamic is just simply the cost of living. So in Southern San Diego County, a one bedroom apartment will go from anywhere between $2,800 and $3,200 a month. Conversely just on the other side of the border a student can pay $1,000 a month for one bedroom. So the inconvenience of them crossing the border every day is really dictated by economics. So we do have students that enroll in the college across the border as well. really it's the relationships with our with our feeder district. And we've had a really good working relationship, but I think where there's areas of opportunity to answer your previous question is, we have a community supported bond last November, $800 million. And one of the areas of opportunities that we see is building a professional development center, because on our campus, we have the Advancing Equity and Teaching Academy, which talks about pedagogy for students in the classroom, looking at data. Really a lot of conversations around how our faculty see students using chat GPT as a supplemental tool, rather than a guiding tool for assignments. We're having those conversations, but they're not necessarily having those conversations at the high schools. So what we want to do is build a professional development center that would work with our high schools on professional development, so we can have those conversations in the classroom. But where we also saw a lot of difficulty is when we were building our dual enrollment programs, how the high schools were using the criteria for selecting students who participate in those programs. They were using a lot of historical criteria, like GPA, advanced placement. And so we had to do a lot of work with our high schools around how they could expand the criteria to select students who were participating in dual enrollment. So we are building a professional development center, but really the programming around how we can be supportive of our key through 12 districts as well. But we have 1,400 students enrolled in dual enrollment this semester, which for our service areas are really good number. But we also have a middle college high school on our campus where we have students taking a blended curriculum of A through G and college coursework at the same time. And as a matter of fact, we had two students graduating May. One was Nikolette Luna. She achieved her Associate of Arch-degree in Journalism. And is now a junior at UC Berkeley. And then we had Ivana Ruiz graduate from Otaj Ranch High School and is a junior at Yale this semester. And so that's great on an individual level. But we want to build a system that mass produces students who have those credentials to get into the system. But there's a lot of systemic work that needs to happen for us to be able to get there. So we don't really have a problem building the partnerships because of our high school relationship. It's more how we expand the rubrics and how we support students through to completion in those programs. Thank you. I know we're almost out of time, which is really unfortunate. Because I'd love to-- I have so many more questions for you all. But if there would be like three words that you could leave folks with who are leaving from this session today to encourage them as they might start engaging more and trying to increase the amount of dual enrollment pathways going on in their own locality, what would it be? Does anyone want to take cut at that? Or one sentence? How about that? I'll go first. And that's the idea. We talked about challenges today. But whatever challenges come up, you're going to be able to get through them. I keep your sense of humor be flexible. And just keep in mind what we always keep in mind is educators. And that's the fact that access to dual credit, meaning post-secondary education, is a game changer. And it's a life changer. I don't-- I think for me, it would be that we sometimes get lost in the details of academic speak. And again, because I live in the space of trying to articulate to policymakers who don't live on a full-time basis in higher education policy or funding arena, we want to keep it focused on student success. So to me, it is always focused on talking to elected officials. And for me, at least, that what we're doing is leading to greater student success. And no one can argue with the fact that if the state is focused on achieving greater student success, the future is in a much better place. All sorts of policy outcomes will occur in a positive way if we stay focused on student success and not get lost in some of the acronyms and the terminology that we tend to live in in the academic space. So again, my challenge is to translate the great work that's being done at the institutional level, with making sure that we continue to have momentum from elected officials to fund and to support the policy changes that we're advocating for. I would just say, challenge-old systems. When we brought the programming to serve 7th and 8th graders on our campus and our theater and performing arts program, faculty were very upset with me. Their input to me was, we're not a middle school. If we wanted to be a middle school, we'd be a middle school teacher. And so I said, well, are you aware that we have students in our theater program that are performing at the old globe in San Diego, in Belbol Park, they're performing in how a Grinch stole Christmas. These are very, very talented young people and they can perform at a college level. Now I get emails from those faculty saying, how are we going to build this program out moving forward? But I had to go to the academic senate. I had faculty really challenging the notion that our 7th and 8th graders could perform at that level. And now they're asking me how we expand programming. So we have to see the things that people can't necessarily see as visionary leaders because we know they'll be successful. And we're tapping into the talent of our young people. So a couple just words to live by that I've live by is don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Sometimes when we do this work, we feel like we have to solve all the problems or the conditions have to be just perfect before we actually move. And so I've learned that there's a lot of value. And just like I said, if it's a pilot with X amount of students or you start with this department that has a willingness to engage over a department that's going to completely resist, I would just say find that path. And then the other piece, especially with the K-12 partnership conversations, I use this in a room a couple times. I'm like, OK, what is it going to take for us to land the plane? To land the plane. Let's land the plane. And I could keep saying it because there are people who want to talk in circles for a long time. And it's just like, OK, y'all, another semester is going to go by before we implement if we just don't land the plane. So those are my two mantras. And what does it look like to land the plane? And let's not have perfect be the enemy of the good. And it's a trustee you get the last word on your word. Bring us home, sister. All right. So last year I had the privilege of presenting with Naomi who was presenting with us earlier at the California School Board's Association meeting. So those trustee, those school board members have their own association, just like we have ACCT. And there are about 2,000 of them, along with superintendents. And it was shocking to me how many school board members and superintendents did not know about dual enrollment and did not know what community college was actually in their service area and their district. So if I have any advice, it's don't wait for your K-12 to reach out to you because they may not know who to reach out to. Start to make those relationships. If you don't already have them with your superintendents with the principals at the schools. And if you're a trustee, ask your CEO what they're doing in terms of reaching out for dual enrollment. Look, we all go out and do outreach when we're looking to recruit students. Oftentimes the outreach department speaks to the school counselors. But the CEO, your superintendent president or your chancellor, doesn't always reach out to speak to the superintendent of that school district. So if there's one thing I can lead you with is, let's forge those partnerships and start those relationships. Thank you so much to all of you for joining us this afternoon. And then Steve, do we have one more poll question? Sorry. No more polls. No more polls. So thank you for staying sticking with us all day.