Introduction

College-level learning in high school is learning during the high school years that has been deemed by some college or colleges or their agents (such as the College Board or the International Baccalaureate program) to be equivalent in both content and standards to familiar college or university freshman or sophomore courses. Such learning may (or may not) be accorded credit towards the baccalaureate depending on the policies of the college or university of matriculation and on the curricular area and academic performance of the entering student. Most often, the learning conveys credit toward the high school diploma as well.

College-level learning has been increasing dramatically in recent years. Best known is the Advanced Placement Program of the College Board, which in academic year 1998-99 administered well over one million examinations in 18 subject areas to more than 700,000 high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors.  The AP program has been increasing at a rate of some 12 percent per year since its inception in the early 1950s. Other models of college-level learning in high school, based not on validating examinations like those of the AP program, but on successful performance in actual courses taken in either high school or college venues, have also be increasing sharply, although aggregate summary data on other than AP and the International Baccalaureate is limited.

This fast-growing and politically attractive phenomenon has important implications to both secondary and higher education. Some of the advantages of college-level learning lie in its potential to lessen the duplication between the high school and college curricula, to get the high school student more quickly into the content and expectations of "collegiate" learning, to allow a richer, more substantial curriculum during both the high school and the baccalaureate years; and possibly to allow college graduation in less than four full-time years. At the same time, the practice raises profound questions about the essence of the high school college preparatory curriculum and the locus of that curricular authority: e.g. with the high school, the college, the state (legislatures or education departments or higher education systems), or external agents such as the College Board and its Advanced Placement Program. College-level learning in high school has become a major player in the so-called reform of high school curriculum and standards, as well as in college admissions and success, and therefore in the vital equity implications thereof. It also has practical implications with regard to learning productivity, time-to-degree, and jobs: e.g. whether any reduction of curricular duplication between high school and college leads to the loss of high school teaching or college faculty positions.

In all models of college-level learning in high school, it is up to the college or university into which the student ultimately matriculates: (a) whether the learning will be accepted for college credit at all—or merely used, if at all, for admissions or placement purposes; (b) the number of credits and the grades (sometimes only a "credit" or "pass") to be awarded for each course or examination successfully completed and accepted; (c) whether the credits thus awarded are good for graduation credit, or merely "noted on the transcript”; and (d) finally, what requirements of the baccalaureate (e.g. general education, the major, or electives) these credits will satisfy.  In turn, the stance on the part of a college’s or university faculty and academic administrators toward college-level learning in high school depends in part on the level of its selectivity and sometimes on the particular model of the practice. For example, a highly selective institution can expect substantial amounts of college-level learning from its applicants indicating expected levels of academic preparedness and ambition, but can still discourage or limit altogether the application of these credits toward accelerated graduation. Or at the other extreme, a college or university (generally a less selective one) can reach into neighboring high schools and promote the concept of college-level learning, perhaps as a recruitment tool or net revenue generator (in spite of the tuition dollars given up by early graduation), and actively market the possibility for early graduation. Thus, the attitudes and policies of colleges and universities toward college-level learning in high school—and toward the different models thereof—are critical to the goals that this changing and expanding practice will be able to achieve.

College and University Policies toward College-Level Learning in High School

Information on college and university policies toward college-level learning is drawn mainly from a questionnaire administered in the 1998-99 academic year to a national sample of colleges and universities, filled out principally by the office of academic affairs, frequently with input or assistance from offices of admissions, registrar, or institutional research. The 451 useable returned questionnaires provide information on:

1. The extent, within recent entering classes, of college-level learning experiences from high school (for which graduation credit may be given or at least considered), in so far as may be known.

2. The extent to which the college or university itself participated in or actively sponsored college-level learning in high schools, either through a program of welcoming into its classes exceptional students from local high schools, or through according college credit on its transcript to classes that are monitored and deemed equivalent to their "regular" college courses, although taught in the high school venue by high school teachers.

3. The general attitudes toward college-level learning in high school—e.g. welcoming, moderately accepting, or discouraging—and any differences in such attitudes toward the different types of college-level learning in high school (as described below) or among different types of institution (by Carnegie classification).

4. The policies by which college-level learning credits may be applied and “counted” toward the credits needed for baccalaureate graduation. More specifically:

· Where administratively do those policies mainly reside: e.g. only with the department as the “owner” of the counterpart college courses, or at a college- or university-wide level, as with the faculty senate and the chief academic affairs officer?
· Where on the transcript are the college-level learning credits most commonly accepted (e.g. as among the general education requirements, academic skills requirements, introductory courses in the students’ eventual major, or as general elective credits)?
· How (if at all) do these policies differentiate among the various types, or models, of college-level learning in high school (e.g. as between the Advanced Placement program of the College Board, as opposed to school-based, or concurrent enrollment programs, as described above)?

5. The general view of the purpose and/or benefit of college-level learning in high school: that is, whether such learning is viewed by the college or university administration or by the faculty (acknowledging that there may be differences) as, for example: (a) part of high school curricular and standards reform, perhaps, but not generally an acceptable substitute for its own courses; (b) a useful signal to the admissions process of an applicant’s academic preparedness and ambition; (c) a way to reduce high school-college curricular duplication and thereby permit the student to enter more quickly into more advanced courses in college (but not necessarily to graduate any earlier); or (d) a valid way to save both taxpayer and family resources, and actually truncate a portion of the undergraduate collegiate experience?

The questionnaire was sent to approximately 50 percent of two-and four-year colleges and universities, stratified by the 1994 Carnegie Classification: Research Universities I and II, Doctoral Universities I and II, Masters (Comprehensive) Colleges I and II, Baccalaureate (Liberal Arts) Colleges I and II, and Two-Year Colleges.  The states of California, New York, Florida, Virginia, Minnesota, and Utah, where state policies had recently highlighted college-level learning in high school, were over-sampled. The questionnaires were addressed to chief academic officers, with a cover letter explaining the purpose of the project and encouraging assistance from offices of admissions, institutional research, and the registrar. A 33 percent response rate brought 451 useable completed questionnaires.

Conclusions

A sobering conclusion from this research, completed in 2000, is how little scholarship or even thoughtful analysis there has been on what the authors perceive to be an arena of educational practice that is expanding dramatically and that has the potential to link virtually all high schools with all colleges and universities. It is an arena in which state and federal education authorities, individual schools and school districts, and higher educational institutions are already deeply involved in policies and practices, but are too frequently acting both in isolation and in the absence of either clear principles or an appreciation of unintended consequences.

College-level learning is fraught with both great promise, and with considerable peril—or at least considerable “complications.” Some key conclusions, informed both by the survey research reported here, and also by many discussions over recent years with college and university presidents and chief academic officers, high school teachers and principals, and college-level learning providers, including both examination-based college-level learning (especially leaders and participants in the Advanced Placement Program of the College Board) and participants and proponents of school-based programs, are the following:
 

1. The amount of college-level learning in high school is growing dramatically, although there are serious gaps in our understanding simply of how much, what kinds, where, and at what rates of growth. For the AP program, in which the numbers of AP courses, student participants, examinations, and examination results are well known, the critical missing descriptive information is what happen to the AP credits, and what difference does the AP experience make to the collegiate experience? For the school-based programs, we know too little about the numbers of high schools and high school students participating, either nation-wide or by state (important because such practices are so much a function of state policies), who the college or university sponsors are, and what happens to the participating high school students after the college-level learning experience.

2. The several rationales for college-level learning ---e.g. as part of high school curricular and standards reform, or as a way to reduce alleged duplication of curricular offerings between high school and college (with or without faster time to the degree), or as
a way to enhance a student’s prospects for admission to a selective college—are vastly different, as portrayed in Table 1.

Table 1: Purposes Served by College-Level Learning in High School, by Parties, or Actors in the Process

Parties or Actors  > Purposes or Rationales  (below)	Participant (high school student & parent)	High School	Provider (AP or college sponsor of school-based learning)	College or university of potential matriculation	Agent of public policy (school board, trustees, or government)
1. to enhance the amount and / or level of learning in high school: i.e., be a part of the high school curricular reform.	May be important	Major rationale	May be important	May be important	Major rationale
2. to reduce the number of credits and lower the costs of college to be borne by parents, students, and taxpayers.	May be important			May be important	Major rationale
3. To enhance the student's prospects for admission and success in college.	Major rationale	Major rationale	Major rationale	May be important	May be important
4. To enhance status, educational leverage, and revenue of provider or sponsor of the college-level learning.			Major rationale
5. To enhance market positions and undergraduate programs of the potential institutions of matriculation.

Furthermore, the particular operative rationale, in the end, will depend fundamentally on the stakeholder, or participant—e.g. the high school student or parent, high school principal or teacher (or teacher’s union), the college or university academic administration or faculty (or the faculty of a particular department), or any of several supposed “public actors” on behalf of a more general public interest, such as a state department of education or a governor’s office. This paper drew heavily on a database of views toward college-level learning in high school expressed by chief academic officers of a national sample of colleges and universities. Although the paper has been informed by scholarship from other perspectives, we know much less, for example, about why students participate in AP or other programs of college-level learning, or why high school principals, or district superintendents participate in such programs, and whether these essentially administrative stakeholders differ from their teachers or faculty. In any event, it make little sense even to talk or write about policies that might encourage, discourage or otherwise accommodate college-level learning in high school without stipulating which stakeholder or participant is to be the object of that policy, and what purposes are to be served.

3. The enormous variability in the missions, governance, and perceived quality of institutions of higher education in America, coupled with the precious principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy, mean that college-level learning from high school will continue to be treated very differently by different institutions. Virtually all institutions, faculty and administrations alike, will respond favorably to the prospect of entering students better prepared in high school, and so will see college-level learning favorably in that light. However, some institutions (either academic administrators or faculty or both) will resist these courses substituting for their courses, whether in a common general education core or the introductory courses to certain disciplinary majors. Other institutions will almost certainly resist these supposedly “college-level” courses or credits less on academic grounds and more on self-interested grounds of preserving enrollments, net tuition revenue, and jobs (although these professionally “less acceptable reasons” are less likely to show up on a survey questionnaire). Still others may attempt to market the institution by making their accommodation of college-level learning in high school a key part in their promise of accelerated baccalaureates. In short, the rationale or purpose to be served by college-level learning in high school, and the policies by which these courses or credits are accommodated by the college or university depends not only on the stakeholder or participant, but on the nature of the institution.

4. The dimensions of institutional variation that seem to matter in these policies are the degree of selectivity, the particular academic mission, the vulnerability to market competition, and the susceptibility to state laws and regulations—as, for example, requirements that all public four-year colleges accept without question all community college credits, even if they may have been earned in a school-based mode during high school.

5. The forms of college-level learning in high school are also vastly different, particularly those that are examination-based (principally the AP) and those that are school-based (especially those school-based programs that are sponsored by community colleges and essentially open-admission four-year colleges). The difference lies not so much in the actual content and the standards of the supposedly college-level high school academic experience (which is perhaps all that really ought to matter) but in the perception, especially on the part of the college or university academic administration and faculty, of the integrity of the process.

6. Variations in institutional type are confounded with the variations in the forms of college-level learning in high school. This is particularly revealed in the differences between the policies and procedures of two-year colleges and of the more selective four-year colleges and universities. Two-year colleges (mainly public community colleges) are much less susceptible than four-year college and universities to departmental and faculty possessiveness over their curricula, and less “wrapped up” in the kinds of academic principles (although sometimes with “self-interested twists”) that so often preoccupy the faculty of four-year colleges and universities. Even more “confounding” is when the college or university is also a provider or sponsor of college-level learning in neighboring high schools—and especially in the case of two year colleges that give college credits to supposedly college-level courses taught to high school students by high school teachers in what we have described as a school-based program of college-level learning in high school. These two-year colleges relate to the phenomenon of college-level learning in high school not principally as potential acceptors or rejecters of such credits brought in by their entering freshmen, but as providers, or sponsors, of college-level learning (which happens also to bring them considerable financial advantage). As such, two-year colleges are heavily invested in furthering the acceptance of college-level learning in high school, and especially in the acceptance on the part of four-year colleges and universities of any credits on the transcripts of their transferring students that happen to have been earned in this school-based mode prior to the students’ matriculation at the two-year college.

7. The growth of all forms of college-level learning in high school will change the stakes to all participants in ways that policy makers will not be able to control, and perhaps even always to anticipate. That is, AP could accomplish certain things, with relatively few “waves” or unintended consequences, when it was a very small program, in the hands of a small number of highly able and dedicated secondary school teachers, primarily from private and “good” public high schools, and a similarly small number of college faculty “true believers,” mainly from private liberal arts colleges, and was oriented mainly to “top” high school students aspiring to selective colleges and universities (but not necessarily expecting to graduate early as a consequence of the experience). However, an AP (or any other examination-based) program that aspires (or is required) to accommodate say, 15 to 30 percent of high school students, is a very different sort of “player,” profoundly affecting both the high school curriculum and the academic experiences and opportunities of virtually all high school students. And in a nation that at the same time treasures the local control of its schools, and yet forever tries to “fix them” at state and federal levels of government, there are bound to be increasing questions of authority and legitimacy directed to the College Board and the Advanced Placement Program, as to any other major player in the provision of college-level learning in the high school.

8. The Advanced Placement program needs to maintain the credibility of its authority, which stems from those high school teachers and college faculty, under the direction of the College Board and the psychometric experts of the Educational Testing Service, who devise and update the AP course outlines, make up the examinations, grade and score the examinations, and perform the tests of validity and reliability. This challenge of legitimacy will undoubtedly become greater as the AP program continues to grow--and as the stakes to increasing numbers of high school students also grow. For now, the reputation and the credibility of the AP program to college and universities depends on its long reputation, the conservative and rigorous standards for what the program claims to be worthy of consideration for college credit, and the transparency of the process, including the critical separation of evaluation from teaching. As the program expands, and as the inevitably increasing numbers (and probably also as increasing percentages) of test takers do not receive the 3s, 4s, and 5s deemed worthy of college credit—and/or as increasing numbers of colleges and universities decline to accept these scores for graduation credit--the AP Program is likely to come under political pressure to justify its considerable (and increasing) academic hegemony over the content and standards of the US high school curriculum.

9. The school-based programs have a different challenge to their authority and credibility. Unlike the AP program, the school-based programs are, at least in theory, under the direct academic supervision of a college or university, which should attest to the integrity of both the curriculum and the standards of the course (just as it attests to the academic integrity of courses given to fully-matriculated students on its campus taught by its “regular” faculty). However, there is a suspicion on the part of many (not all) four-year institutions that this academic supervision may be inadequate. This suspicion is exacerbated by the deep-seated (if unfortunate) prejudice on the part of many four-year college and university faculty and academic administrators toward the content and standards of community college courses anyway—not to mention those courses in the high schools, taught by high school teachers, that the community college is now asserting to be equivalent to the content and standards of its regular courses. And this suspicion is even further exacerbated by the perception that the embrace of school-based learning on the part of community colleges is driven at least in part by a financial incentive to capture full-time-equivalent enrollment-based state aid—which in many instances has already been paid to the high school that is actually paying for the instruction.

Underlying all of the issues underlying college-level learning in high school is the deeply important question of what actually ought to constitute the basis for college credit. To some colleges and universities (especially, but not exclusively, more selective ones) college-level, at least for graduation credit, may go beyond mastery of content to experiences requiring full (or even full-time) college matriculation. In such a case, the role and worth of college-level learning in high school will be mainly limited to the reform of the high school curriculum and the possibility of some curricular acceleration (but not necessarily early completion) in college. To other colleges and universities, college-level learning in high school expedites the completion of the post-secondary degree, saves money for the parent, student, and taxpayer, and solves, or at least ameliorates, the historic disconnect between the high school and the college in America. This variation is very much part of American education. To the extent that these differences, manifested in both policy and practice, can be based on purposeful variations in institutional mission and academic principles, and can be fully informed by scholarly analysis, American education, both pre-collegiate and postsecondary, will be well served. It is hoped that this analysis has made just such a contribution.