Panel:
Supporting Academic Success for All through College Acceleration
(Education)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Our panel attempts to explore the college acceleration pipeline from access to college completion and for all, including disadvantaged students, program participants, and their college peers in the same classroom. Due to growing concerns with postsecondary participation rate, college readiness, and college cost, a variety of college acceleration strategies has be established and grown significantly since the early 1990s. Programs such as dual enrollment (DE), advanced placement (AP), international baccalaureate, and early college high schools allow high school students to earn college credits (Andrews & Marshall, 1991; Gerber, 1987; Karp, 2012; Mokher & McLendon, 2009). To date, only a few rigorous papers have looked at the impact of college acceleration strategies, with the majority of them focusing on the impact of dual enrollment program on the participants (AIR, 2013; Allen & Dadgar, 2012; An, 2013; Speroni, 2011). Very few examined the impact of other kinds of college acceleration program or the impact on college students who shared the same classroom as dual enrollment students. Furthermore, a number of reports identify noticeable disparities across different subpopulations in both access to these programs and actual participation in DE (e.g. Fink, Jenkins & Yanagiura, 2017; U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2018). Using national and two state administrative datasets, our panel pulls together researchers and practitioners across four institutions to move beyond questions of whether or not these programs ‘work’ and rather examine what factors mediate their benefits, and for whom they do (and do not) work. Specifically, our panel looks at the national disparities in access (paper 1 ) the effects and determinantes on college outcomes (paper 3 and 2 respectively), and the unintended consequence on community college students (paper 4) of different types of college acceleration strategies. As a whole, this panel tells a crucial and evidence-based story of how institutions can best use the different strategies to achieve academic success for all stakeholders involved.
