Early College High Schools (ECHS) partner with post-secondary institutions to award students, specifically those from historically marginalized groups, with significant transferrable college credit--tuition free--along with a high school diploma. Utilizing the frameworks of counterspace and counterstory, this study aimed to understand the…

Early College High Schools (ECs) aim to increase postsecondary enrollment and degree attainment, specifically among historically minoritized populations. Research outlines the positive outcomes of ECs, yet less research examines the unintended consequences of these consolidated college preparation programs. Through interviews with 13 EC graduates,…

Early college high school (ECHS) and dual enrollment programs offer opportunities for students to work toward their 2-year degree while still in high school. The problem for this study was that the ECHS and dual enrollment programs had not been compared to see if they facilitated 2-year college degree completion compared to one another and to a…

The good news? Texas is growing. In 2022, Texas joined California to be only the second U.S. state with a population of over 30 million people. The bad news? Texas is growing. More specifically, the Texas labor market is growing. One strategy to improve career readiness is the creation of Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools (P-TECH).…

This article presents a new measure of curricular intensity that is objective, parsimonious, clearly defined, replicable, and comparable over time for use by researchers interested in examining trends, causes, and outcomes of high school course taking. After proposing a reduced-form version of Adelman's curricular intensity index comprised of…

In this qualitative case study, I examined the perspectives of first-generation and second-generation African American alumni of an early college high school in order to better understand the role of this model of education in their high school diploma attainment, accumulation of college credits, and aspirations to continue their post-secondary…

Students moving from high school to college in the United States typically confront a bewildering set of largely unstructured options. In the absence of clear signals about how to get the most out of college, they often choose pathways that involve limited academic rigor and engagement. In this article, Richard Arum describes a study that followed…

As workforce participation increasingly requires a college degree, ensuring that more students from traditionally underrepresented populations have the opportunity to enter and complete college is an equity imperative. To that end, high school reforms have promoted "college-going cultures" in low-performing high schools through…

This paper uses administrative North Carolina data linked from high school to college and national surveys to characterize the largest contributor to the STEM gender gap: engineering. Disparities are the result of differential entry during high school or earlier rather than postsecondary exit. Differences in pre-college academic preparation…

Early colleges are an innovative model of schooling that combines high school and college. A 14-year, rigorous experimental study has been examining whether this model works. The study compares early college students who were accepted through a lottery to students who applied to early colleges but were not accepted through the lottery (the control…

Early colleges are a new model of schooling in which the high school and college experiences are merged, shortening the total amount of time a student spends in school. This study uses a lottery-based experimental design to examine the impact of the model on longer term outcomes, including attainment of a postsecondary credential and academic…

We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to examine the explanatory power of high schools over student sorting to colleges and majors at 4-year public universities. We develop a "preparation and persistence index" (PPI) for each university-by-major cell in the Missouri system that captures dimensions of selectivity and rigor…

Homeschooling in the United States has grown considerably over the past several decades. This article presents findings from the Factors Influencing College Success in Mathematics (FICSMath) survey, a national study of 10,492 students enrolled in tertiary calculus, including 190 students who reported homeschooling for a majority of their high…

The changing nature of the U.S. economy has fostered concerns that too few students are successfully completing postsecondary education (Achieve, 2004). Three quarters of those who enter high school graduate within four years, with approximately 70 percent of those graduates enrolling immediately in some form of postsecondary education (Ross et…

Developed in response to concerns that too few students were enrolling and succeeding in postsecondary education, early college high schools are small schools that blur the line between high school and college. This article presents results from a longitudinal experimental study comparing outcomes for students accepted to an early college through…