To increase the number of students graduating from high school who enroll and succeed in college, North Carolina has established the largest number of early college high schools (early colleges) in the United States. This brief from the SERVE Center at UNC-G presents results from a longitudinal experimental study of early colleges in North Carolina.
Specific findings include:
- More early college students take and succeed in the courses they need for college.
- Early college students earn an average of 22 college credits while they are in high school compared to an average of 3 college credits received by students in the control group.
- Early college students graduate from high school at a slightly higher rate than the control students.
- More early college students enroll in college.
- Early colleges create an environment explicitly focused on college readiness.
It is often hard to determine the impact of a program like an early college because the students who apply or are selected to go there might be very different than regular high school students. Just looking at a school’s outcomes might not tell you how well the school is doing because any better results might simply be due to better prepared students entering the schools.
This study uses an experimental design — frequently called the “gold standard” in education research — to address this concern. To be in the study, schools had to use a lottery to select students. Students applied and then became part of a pool of eligible applicants. Within that pool, some students were randomly assigned to attend the early college and some were randomly assigned not to attend. The study compares the results for the students who applied and were randomly chosen to get in to the results for the students who applied and were not randomly chosen. This means the two groups are the same, comparing apples to apples.
