This article examines the emergence of high school-to-college transition models, referred to as academic pathways, that regard community colleges as a primary partner for higher learning. It explores three academic pathways that deliberately partner secondary schools with community colleges. They are dual credit and dual enrollment, tech prep and…

Dual credit, the approach by which students receive both high school and college credit for the same course, has received enormous attention in recent years. The original intent of dual credit was to provide more challenging curricula to academically prepared high school students. Over the past three decades, the target recipients of the program…