College Before College

Listen to the 8-part "Summer School" series of the Slice With 'Dice podcast each Saturday in June and July 2026 in the above applet or wherever you listen to podcasts. For years, earning college credit in high school was viewed as something relatively specialized. Advanced Placement courses, concurrent credit, and early college programs often served a fairly small population of academically accelerated students seeking opportunities beyond what their local schools could traditionally provide.

That world has changed remarkably quickly.

Across the country, dual enrollment and concurrent credit have moved from the margins of education into the mainstream. Students are graduating with semesters — and sometimes years — of college coursework already completed. Policymakers celebrate acceleration as a strategy for affordability and workforce development. Families increasingly view early college credit as both a financial necessity and a competitive advantage. Schools market the number of transcripted hours their graduates accumulate before ever stepping onto a college campus.

In many ways, this expansion represents something genuinely positive. More students, especially students from rural communities, lower-income backgrounds, and first-generation college families, now have access to advanced learning opportunities that once felt out of reach. When students encounter meaningful challenge and receive strong support, acceleration can be transformational. It can build confidence, open doors, and fundamentally alter what young people believe is possible for themselves.

But over the course of my Summer School podcast series College Before College, I found myself returning repeatedly to a larger tension sitting underneath this movement.

Acceleration is increasingly being treated not simply as an opportunity, but as a defining logic of modern education.

The public conversation often focuses on visible metrics: credits earned, degrees completed, time reduced, money saved. Yet some of the most important dimensions of education resist easy measurement. Curiosity. Exploration. Confidence. Mentorship. Identity formation. Intellectual risk-taking. The ability to encounter complexity and grow through it.

A recent report from the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships warned that states risk creating a “quality lottery” in which students accumulate the same number of credits while experiencing dramatically different levels of rigor, advising, support, and long-term value. Additional research from Columbia University’s Community College Research Center explored the growing use of “momentum metrics” designed to predict student success through credit accumulation and gateway course completion.

Those studies raise important questions. What should we actually measure? Are we beginning to confuse accumulation with learning itself? And if students increasingly complete college-level work during high school, what is college supposed to become in the future?

I keep returning to one central idea: the healthiest version of acceleration is not about helping students move through education faster. It is about giving them greater freedom within education itself.

Done well, early college pathways create room for exploration rather than narrowing it. Students gain flexibility to pursue research, study abroad, interdisciplinary learning, creative work, and deeper intellectual engagement. Acceleration becomes expansive rather than transactional.

But sustaining that vision requires more than policy enthusiasm. As states aggressively expand concurrent credit expectations through legislation like Arkansas’s ACCESS Act, community colleges and universities are increasingly being asked to deliver high-quality acceleration at significant discounts. Families may save money, but institutions still carry the real costs of accreditation, advising, faculty oversight, student support, transfer systems, and quality assurance.

Ultimately, the future of “college before college” will depend on whether educational systems can balance access, quality, equity, and sustainability simultaneously.

Because the goal of acceleration should not simply be helping students arrive sooner.

It should be helping them arrive fuller.