Des Moines Concurrent Enrollment Students Show Indicators of Success

Opportunities for large-scale quantitative research on concurrent enrollment using national and state-wide databases are limited by the availability of data sets with longitudinal information that spans the secondary/post-secondary divide and contains sufficient information to disaggregate the type of instructor and/or location of a course. Individual colleges with reliable internal data are increasingly adding to a growing body of research documenting how students benefit from taking concurrent enrollment classes.

A recent study conducted by Dr. Randy Mead of Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) and presented at the NACEP conference in Minneapolis, showed greater success for students who took certain concurrent enrollment classes in high school compared to students who had not participated.

The study involved first-time, full-time students enrolled at DMACC from 2003 to 2005 who had ACT scores of 19 and above – representing students in the upper 50% of students taking the ACT. Seventy-one students who had previously taken concurrent enrollment math and/or English classes as high school students were compared to 996 who had not taken any.

In order to understand whether differences in the two groups in his sample might affect his analysis of student success, Mead examined the demographics of the sample population and determined that they were similar between the two groups – students that had taken concurrent enrollment courses and those that had not, though males were somewhat overrepresented in the concurrent enrollment group. In their first semester as full-time students at the college, there was no statistically significant variation between the two groups in retention (i.e. early withdrawals from a course). A statistically significant difference was found in entering academic performance between the two groups: students in the concurrent enrollment group were more likely to have higher ACT math scores and first semester college grade point averages (GPAs) than their peers in the control group.

Mead’s choice of a student success outcome variable was the likelihood that a student earned 24 credit hours with a minimum 2.0 GPA within two years of enrolling full-time. One-third of the students in the total sample were unsuccessful in meeting this indicator. Mead ran a sequential regression model to identify the variables that best predicted student success. According to Mead’s analysis, students were six times more likely to experience success if they completed a concurrent enrollment English class prior to enrolling full-time. The only other variable that Mead examined that was nearly as high a predictor of student success was first-semester GPA. High school ACT scores and taking a concurrent enrollment math class had little impact on the likelihood of student success.

When asked what this research says about concurrent enrollment programs, Meade commented, “It says that they are fulfilling what they are designed to fulfill and that the students are successful after attending the community college.”

For further reading, see Mead’s dissertation abstract or full dissertation.