Make Dual Enrollment Easier and More Effective

When it comes to declining higher education enrollments, there is one bright spot: dual enrollment. While a common offering at most high schools, dual enrollment is one of the few segments that experienced growth in recent years. And for many institutions, community colleges in particular, that growth is what’s keeping them afloat. 

According to the Department of Education, nearly 90% of high schools in the US today offer dual enrollment, with 34% of high school students taking advantage of these college courses. In fact, NPR reported that while enrollment growth at community colleges plummeted during the pandemic, these colleges saw more high school students walk through their virtual and physical doors. 

For many students, high schools, and colleges, the processes that support dual enrollment are manual. Relying on paper forms, handwritten signatures, phone calls, faxes, and emails, today’s dual-enrollment workflows are inefficient and error-prone. Compounding this issue is a lack of transparency into degree pathways. Since students don’t always have visibility into how the courses they take will count toward their intended major, they may lose hard-earned credits. It is clear that as enrollment in dual-credit courses continues to climb, it will be difficult to scale and meet the growing demand of students while ensuring that the courses they take will align with a pathway to completion.

Automating manual processes and increasing transparency into student pathways are two critical ways colleges and universities can improve dual enrollment.

Remove bottlenecks for students while enabling institutions and high schools to refocus their staff on more productive work by automating time-consuming processes. Using an integrated technology solution, institutions can automate approvals, registration, enrollment, and payment processing, resulting in reduced costs and better, more efficient program management.

Here’s how a dedicated technology solution works. High school students and their guidance counselors can search for dual-credit courses across multiple institutions, see available seats, and register, all from a single website. Parents and guidance counselors receive approval requests electronically, eliminating the need to track down handwritten signatures and reducing the time it takes for the student to secure approval to take the course. 

A process that once took days to complete now takes just minutes, which increases the likelihood that the student will secure a seat in the class they wish to take. And because it automates the entire process—from course discovery to registration, approvals, and any required payment—it eliminates human error as well.

To ensure that dual enrollment is intentional and effective, provide student-facing pathways to help students make informed decisions about the dual-credit courses they take. With an integrated dual enrollment solution, institutions can align dual-credit courses with specific program and credential requirements and make this information searchable and actionable for students and counselors. 

 As a result, students gain a clearer picture of how their credits will count, and they are more likely to complete their degree on time, without wasting credits on courses that don’t contribute to their academic progress.

Process automation and student-facing pathways are becoming increasingly important to dual-enrollment initiatives as the number of students taking dual-credit courses continues to grow. Institutions that adopt the right technology will not only simplify the dual enrollment experience, but also increase the likelihood of student success.

Quottly Dual Enrollment, powered by the Quottly Platform, enables higher education institutions, school districts, and individual K-12 schools to manage course availability more efficiently, automate approval workflows, and make it easy for high school students and counselors to find and register for dual-credit courses that are aligned with degree pathways.

To learn more, please request a demo.