When the Credits Outrun the Learning

Over the past few years, I have watched several high-school students accumulate enough AP, dual-enrollment, and college credit that senior year begins to look almost optional. One recent case especially caught my attention. The student had effectively completed the academic requirements for graduation, in part through college courses taken while still in high school, but the family decided against graduating early.

I found myself agreeing with that decision, even though the student had done exactly what the system encouraged and had done it well. On paper, there was very little left to accomplish in high school. The harder question was whether completing the requirements was quite the same thing as being ready to move on.

That has been on my mind because my wife and I, as well as many of our colleagues, regularly talk about how unprepared many college students seem when they arrive in our classrooms. Some have gaps in their academic knowledge, but many also struggle to read instructions carefully, manage deadlines, write clearly, communicate appropriately, or figure out what to do when a problem has not already been broken into steps for them.

I am not claiming that these are the same students, or that dual enrollment causes students to arrive at college less prepared. There are plenty of other explanations, and many dual-enrollment students are undoubtedly very strong. Still, there is an odd contrast. High-school students are completing more college work than ever before, while colleges devote considerable effort to helping students handle responsibilities once treated as part of being ready for college. What, exactly, are all those credits telling us?

More college, earlier

Dual enrollment has expanded quickly. The Community College Research Center reports that about 2.8 million high-school students took college courses in 2023–24. About 2 million did so through community colleges, where dual-enrollment students now account for 22 percent of enrollment.

Ohio has embraced this model through College Credit Plus, which allows students to earn high-school and college credit simultaneously, including through online courses. For public-school students at public institutions, tuition, books, and fees are covered.

The appeal is easy to understand. College is expensive. Students who are ready for more advanced work should not have to repeat material they have already mastered, and dual enrollment can open college to students who might not otherwise see it as an option.

The research is generally favorable too. A U.S. Department of Education review found positive effects on high-school completion, college enrollment, credit accumulation, and degree attainment. But the evidence is much thinner when the question shifts from whether students advance through the system to whether they are better prepared for college-level work. The smaller body of research examining academic achievement in college found no discernible effect.

Those are clearly meaningful benefits, but they tell us more about movement through the educational system than about what each credit represents or whether students have developed the full range of abilities we associate with college-level work.

It is easy to treat a college course as simply a more rigorous version of a high-school course. In principle, college courses should offer greater depth, more specialized knowledge, more demanding material, and more responsibility for one’s own learning. But that assumes students arrive prepared to work at that level. When they do not, college instructors often find themselves providing more structure, reviewing skills that were assumed to be in place, or covering less material. The boundary between high school and college becomes harder to maintain when colleges have to compensate for preparation the credentialing system says students already possess.

The credential and the education

Gary Becker’s theory of human capital treats education as an investment in knowledge and skills. If a student can acquire those capabilities earlier and at lower cost, that is a clear gain. Education also produces credentials, and those credentials reduce very different educational experiences to a common form.

Randall Collins made a broader critique of this process in The Credential Society. As credentials become more important for access to opportunities, education can become organized around acquiring them. A system can become very effective at producing recognized evidence of attainment without that evidence capturing everything education was supposed to accomplish.

The problem is partly structural. Families want inexpensive credits, students want progress toward graduation, schools want students to advance, colleges receive public funding for enrolling them, and policymakers can point to credits and degrees as evidence of success. Together, those incentives encourage more of what can be counted, transferred, and recognized as progress.

Credits, graduation rates, enrollment numbers, and time to degree fit easily into reports. Judgment, maturity, curiosity, independence, and the ability to deal with uncertainty do not. Organizational theorists John Meyer and Brian Rowan described how formal structures can become partly decoupled from the activities they are supposed to represent. The credential can remain useful even while becoming a less complete account of what has actually happened educationally.

High school, college, and employment are not simply successive levels of the same activity. High schools provide structure and development over time. Colleges should deepen knowledge and judgment while asking students to become more independent. Employers have their own needs. Society has broader interests still in whether people can think carefully, understand complicated problems, deal with disagreement, and participate responsibly in their communities.

Credits and degrees give these settings a common language, but they can also flatten the differences among them. A college course taken at sixteen can count as progress toward both high school and college even if it substitutes for experiences neither institution can easily reproduce later.

The same logic is beginning to appear within higher education itself. Ohio now requires each public university to establish at least one accelerated 90-credit-hour bachelor’s program aligned with an in-demand career area by the 2027–28 academic year. Given the cost of college, pressure to shorten degrees is understandable, and there is no reason to assume that 120 credits is always the right amount of coursework for a bachelor’s degree. But if college is also supposed to provide intellectual exploration and development beyond a major, deciding what can be removed without loss is not so simple.

The credential is supposed to summarize what has been accomplished. Increasingly, it also seems to influence what the system is organized to accomplish.

The case that first pushed me to think more seriously about this involved a student who had satisfied much of high school through college coursework. Those courses were completed successfully and counted exactly as intended. But they also replaced some of the time the student otherwise would have spent in high school with a different educational experience. That tradeoff may be worthwhile, but the credit system has no way to represent it. It records the requirements completed, not what may have been gained or lost by completing them that way.

When the next institution inherits the gap

Colleges devote substantial resources to advising, tutoring, academic coaching, first-year programs, career readiness, early alerts, and “student success.” Much of that work is valuable, and some of it may simply reflect colleges taking more responsibility for students whom earlier institutions expected to sink or swim.

Still, the picture is curious. Students can arrive with more evidence that they have already completed college work while colleges devote significant effort to helping them develop skills and habits once assumed to precede college. That does not mean high schools or their teachers have failed. They face many of the same pressures to move students forward and demonstrate progress. Each stage can end up accepting the credential produced by the one before it and then dealing with whatever that credential did not capture.

Employers offer another downstream view. I do not think preparing people for jobs is the primary purpose of education, but employers rely heavily on educational credentials as evidence of what people can do. A 2026 Lumina Foundation–Gallup survey found that only 54 percent of employers believed colleges were graduating students with the skills their organizations needed. Yet about three-quarters still preferred candidates with associate or bachelor’s degrees even for jobs that did not formally require one. Other employer research has similarly identified communication, professionalism, and critical thinking as areas where recent graduates could be better prepared.

Employers still rely on the degree, but they also have to find out what the person holding it can actually do.

Ahead on paper

The student who first prompted me to think about this had, on paper, completed what high school required, including coursework classified as college-level. The family looked at that record and decided there was still value in another year of high school. Perhaps that judgment was wrong. Families do not possess a perfect measure of readiness either. But the decision drew a distinction between completing the requirements and being prepared for what follows them.

Students should be able to earn college credit in high school, and many clearly benefit from doing so. There is nothing magical about spending exactly four years in high school or four years in college, and making education cheaper and more accessible is a worthwhile goal. The question is what we give up when we make it faster, and whether we actually know.

Credentials will never capture everything education produces. The problem comes when their administrative usefulness begins to shape the education itself. We have become very precise about how much education students have completed and much less certain about how educated they have become. Somewhere along the way, the record of education has started to define the education itself.